8 Information Publisher

Information Publisher, Enterprise Manager's powerful reporting framework, makes information about your managed environment available to audiences across your enterprise. Strategically, reports are used to present a view of enterprise monitoring information for business intelligence purposes, but can also serve an administrative role by showing activity, resource utilization, and configuration of managed targets. IT managers can use reports to show availability of sets of managed systems. Executives can view reports on availability of applications (such as corporate email) over a period of time.

The reporting framework allows you to create and publish customized reports: Intuitive HTML-based reports can be published via the Web, stored, or e-mailed to selected recipients. Information Publisher comes with a comprehensive library of predefined reports that allow you to generate reports out-of-box without additional setup and configuration.

This chapter covers the following topics:

About Information Publisher
Out-of-Box Report Definitions
Custom Reports
Scheduling Reports
Sharing Reports

About Information Publisher

Information Publisher provides powerful reporting and publishing capability. Information Publisher reports present an intuitive interface to critical decision-making information stored in the Management Repository while ensuring the security of this information by taking advantage of Enterprise Manager's security and access control.

Information Publisher's intuitive user-interface allows you to create and publish reports with little effort. The key benefits of using Information Publisher are:

Provides a framework for creating content-rich, well-formatted HTML reports based on Management Repository data.
Out-of-box reports let you start generating reports immediately without any system configuration or setup.
Ability to schedule automatic generation of reports and store scheduled copies and/or e-mail them to intended audiences.
Ability for Enterprise Manager administrators to share reports with the entire business community: executives, customers, and other Enterprise Manager administrators.

Information Publisher provides you with a feature-rich framework that is your central information source for your enterprise.

Out-of-Box Report Definitions

The focal point of Information Publisher is the report definition. A report definition tells the reporting framework how to generate a specific report by defining report properties such as report content, user access, and scheduling of report generation.

Information Publisher comes with a comprehensive library of predefined report definitions, allowing you to generate fully formatted HTML reports presenting critical operations and business information without any additional configuration or setup. Figure 8–1 shows an example of the Availability History (Group) report, displaying availability information for all members of a group.

Figure 8-1 Availability History (Group) Report

This is the Availability History (Group) Report page.

Description of "Figure 8-1 Availability History (Group) Report"

Generating this HTML report involved three simple steps:

Step 1: Click Availability History (Group) in the report definition list.

Step 2: Select the group for which you want to run the report.

Step 3: Click Continue to generate the fully-formed report.

Supplied report definitions are organized by functional category with each category covering key areas. The following table lists the major functional categories and areas covered by out-of-box reports.

Table 8-1 Predefined Report Definitions

Functional Category	Areas Covered
Deployment and Configuration	Alerts and Policy Violations Application Server Configuration Client Configurations Hardware Linux Operating System Patching Operating System Oracle Database Configuration Oracle Database Software Oracle Fusion Middleware Software Oracle Home Patch Advisories Patching Automation Reports
Enterprise Manager Setup	Agent Management Pack Access
Monitoring	Aggregate Targets Alerts and Policy Violations Availability History BPEL Performance Reports Dashboards Disabled Policies Enterprise Manager Health JBoss Application Server Performance LDAP Directory Server OID Service Policy Groups Root Cause Analysis SOA Performance Reports Service Alerts Service Performance and Usage Service Tests TemplatesWeb Application Page Performance Web Application Request Performance Web Application Transaction Performance
Security	Database Privileges Note: For performance reasons, the number of records that are retrieved for any predefined report is restricted to 200. To retrieve more than 200, create a custom report. Example: Running the "Users and Roles with Access to Key Objects (Database)" report when more than 200 users and roles will be returned. Database Targets Security Policy Overview VPD and OLS Policies
Siebel Transaction	Transaction Reports
Storage	Oracle Database Space Issues Oracle Database Space Usage

Custom Reports

Although the predefined report definitions that come with Information Publisher cover the most common reporting needs, you may want to create specialized reports. If a predefined report comes close to meeting your information requirements, but not quite, you can use Information Publisher's Create Like function to create a new report definition based on one of the existing reports definitions.

Creating Custom Reports

To create custom reports:

Choose whether to modify an existing report definition or start from scratch. If an existing report definition closely matches your needs, it is easy to customize it by using Create Like function.
Specify name, category, and sub-category. Grid Control provides default categories and sub-categories that are used for out-of-box reports. However, you can categorize custom reports in any way you like.
Specify any time-period and/or target parameters. The report viewer will be prompted for these parameters while viewing the report.
Add reporting elements. Reporting elements are pre-defined content building blocks, that allow you to add a variety of information to your report. Some examples of reporting elements are charts, tables, and images.
Customize the report layout. Once you have assembled the reporting elements, you can customize the layout of the report.

Report Parameters

By declaring report parameters, you allow the user to control what data is shown in the report. There are two types of parameters: target and time-period.

Example: If you are defining a report that will be used to diagnose a problem (such as a memory consumption report), the viewer will be able to see information for their target of interest.

By specifying the time-period parameter, the viewer will be able to analyze historical data for their period of interest.

Analyzing Historical Data

Information Publisher allows you to view reports for a variety of time-periods:

Last 24 Hours/ 7 Days/ 31 Days
Previous X Days/ Weeks/ Months/ Years (calendar units)
This Week/ This Month/ This Year (this week so far)
Any custom date range.

Report Elements

Report elements are the building blocks of a report definition. In general, report elements take parameters to generate viewable information. For example, the Chart from SQL element takes a SQL query to extract data from the Management Repository and a parameter specifying whether to display the data in the form of a pie, bar, or line chart. Report elements let you "assemble" a custom report definition using the Information Publisher user interface.

Information Publisher provides a variety of reporting elements. Generic reporting elements allow you to display any desired information, in the form of charts, tables or images. For example, you can include your corporate Logo, with a link to your corporate website. Monitoring elements show monitoring information, such as availability and alerts for managed targets. Service Level Reporting elements show availability, performance, usage and achieved service levels, allowing you to track compliance with Service Level Agreements, as well as share information about achieved service levels with your customers and business executives.

The following table lists the report elements that are supplied with Information Publisher.

Table 8-2 Report Elements

Report Element	Description
Generic Report Elements	Element Descriptions
Chart from SQL	Renders a line, pie or bar chart given a SQL or PL/SQL query.
Image Display	Displays a supplied image.
Separator	Displays a horizontal separator.
Styled Text	Displays text using a chosen style.
Table from SQL	Displays results of a SQL or PL/SQL query as a table.
Service Level Reporting Elements	Element Descriptions
Service Level Details	Displays Actual Service Level achieved over a time-period and violations that affected it.
Service Level Violation	Displays details on Service Level violations for a set of services over a given time-range.
Service Level Summary	Displays information on Service Levels over different time-ranges.
Services Monitoring Dashboard	Displays the Services Monitoring Dashboard showing status, performance, usage and Service-Level information for a set of Services.
Service Status Summary	Displays information on Services' Current status, Performance, Usage and Component Statuses.
Enterprise Manager Setup Element	Element Descriptions
Management Pack Access	Displays licensable targets with management pack access.
Monitoring Elements	Element Descriptions
Application Server Clusters	Displays monitoring and configuration information for Application Server Clusters.
Application Server Targets	Displays monitoring and configuration information for Application Server Targets.
Availability Timeline (Group)	Displays availability of targets over a period of time. Groups, Systems, Redundancy Groups and Clusters are supported.
Metric Details	Displays a graph of a given metric for a set of targets of the same time, over a given time-period.
Open Alerts	Displays details for outstanding alerts for a user-customizable set of targets and severities.
Oracle HTTP Traffic	Displays Oracle HTTP/HTTPS Traffic information.
Service Metric Details	Displays graphs of Performance and Usage metrics for a given service.
System Monitoring Dashboard	Displays status and alert information for a Group or System.
Web Application Page Performance	Renders page performance information for a given Web Application.
Web Application Page Performance By Category	Web Application Page Performance By Category Renders page performance information by domain/region/visitor/web server.
Web Application Request Performance	Displays details about request performance of a web application.
Web Application Transaction Performance Details	Displays transaction performance details for a given transaction.
Web Application Transaction Performance Summary	Displays summary information about transaction performance.
Web Application URL Performance	Displays time series chart showing the performance for a given URL.

Scheduling Reports

Enterprise manager allows you to view reports interactively and/or schedule generation of reports on a flexible schedule. For example, you might want to generate an "Inventory Snapshot" report of all of the servers in your environment every day at midnight.

Flexible Schedules

Grid Control provides the following scheduling options:

One-time report generation either immediately or at any point in the future
Periodic report generation
- Frequency: Any number of Minutes/ Hours/ Days/ Weeks/ Months/ Years
- You can generate copies indefinitely or until a specific date in the future.

Storing and Purging Report Copies

Enterprise manager allows you to store any number of scheduled copies for future reference. You can delete each stored copy manually or you can set up automated purging based on either the number of stored copies or based on retention time. For example, you can have Enterprise Manager purge all reports that are more than 90 days old.

E-mailing Reports

You can choose for scheduled reports to be e-mailed to any number of recipients. You can specify reply-to address and subject of the e-mail.

Sharing Reports

Information Publisher facilitates easy report sharing with the entire user community. Enterprise Manager administrators can share reports with other administrators and roles. However, there may be cases when you need to share reports with non-Enterprise Manager administrators, such as customers and/or business executives. To facilitate information sharing with these users, Enterprise Manager renders a separate reporting website that does not require user authentication.

Note:

To ensure that no sensitive information is compromised, only Enterprise Manager administrators with a special system privilege are allowed to publish reports to the Enterprise Manager reports website.

Information Publisher honors Enterprise Manager roles and privileges, ensuring that only Enterprise Manager administrators can create reports on the information they are allowed to see.When sharing reports, administrators have an option of allowing report viewers to see the report with the owner's privileges. For example, as a system administrator you might want to share a host's performance information with a DBA using your server, but you do not want to grant the DBA any privileges on your host target. In this case, you could create a host performance report, and allow the DBA to view it with your privileges. This way, they only see the information you want them to see, without having access to the host homepage.