IT Analytics makes it easy to navigate System Center data and identify metrics to measure against. While these metrics can be identified and managed within the Service Manager console, Microsoft has a number of technologies that makes it easy to share this information. In this post, we will show you how to create a Scorecard that shows performance against a defined goal and the KPI Trend relative to that goal, all within a SQL Server Reporting Services Report.
Business Need
Management continues to ask the team about disk space utilization and how we can continue to optimize available disk space to support our growing environment. Since all this storage data does exist in SCOM, we will create a scorecard listing the servers of interest, the drives associated to each server, and free space metrics.
New KPI
The first item we will need to create is a Key Performance Indicator. This KPI will be based on the "Windows Server 2008 Operating System (Monitoring)" management pack counter "% Free Space." By creating this KPI based on this single counter, we will be able to split this metric across servers and drives in our scorecard.
We highlight the grand total value and click "New KPI." In the "Edit KPI" dialog box, we add a goal of "75" and trend this over the past 180 days.
After clicking on "Save KPI," the KPI values are saved to the cube. We can now include these values in a SQL Server Reporting Services data set.
SSRS Scorecard
Following the steps outlined in this blog entry to connect to the IT Analytics SCOM Performance Daily cube, we create the dataset we are interested in. We include KPI Trend data as well.
Next, we build out the report by adding host name and entity name to our rows, counter name as a column and the average as the main value.
The next two columns we add will make our scorecard really come to life. We right click on the cell that contains the "average" value and select "Insert Column - Inside Group - Right."
We will do this action twice: one for the state indicator and one for the trend indicator so our table looks like this:
The first indicator we will insert is the "state" indicator. We will place this indicator in the first cell to the right of the average.
Once the indicator has been placed, a dialog box will appear allowing us to select what indicator we want to include. For this first indicator, we will select Shapes:
Once in place, we right click on the icon and select "Indicator Properties" to modify the default settings. On the first page, we name our indicator.
In the Value and States section, we set "Value" to [Sum[Average]]. While these can be adjusted to match requirements, in this example we will leave the default settings.
In the actions page, we leave the default settings of "None."
We will repeat the process above and insert a second indicator to the right.
The second indicator will be a directional indicator:
We then right click on the indicator to change the Value properties. Since the KPI Trend is part of our data set, we can use that value to calculate the trend indicator. We set the value field, adjust the states and click OK.
After some additional formatting, we can view our scorecard detailing for each server, the percent free disk space for each associated drive and how the percent disk space has been changing over the past 180 days.
Summary
Management asked for a report based on free space data within SCOM and to present this data in an easy to understand format. Within IT Analytics, we were able to quickly investigate the Free Disk Space data and define a Key Performance Indicator. This data was then the basis for our SQL Server Reporting Services Scorecard. This scorecard can now be embedded in a web page, included in a SharePoint site, or subscribed to for frequent updates. This new report will enable the team and management to review performance and trending relative to defined goals and make more informed decisions regarding disk space utilization.