MOM 2005 Summary Reporting Pack
Stefan and Blake both watch whats going on in the MOM world and have both blogged about the availability of this reporting pack. Here's the info from the download site:
The MOM 2005 Summary Reporting Pack extends the MOM data warehouse to provide long term reports on performance metrics and alerts based on weekly and daily summarisation of data. Key reports include Exchange resource and protocol utilization, AD disk utilisation and replication latency, OS performance, and generic summary reports for performance counter analysis, alert counts, and alert resolution times. The Summary Reporting Pack increases the performance and reduces the storage resources required for long term reporting with the MOM data warehouse. The download page for Summary Reporting Pack is here and you should also get to grips with how the MOM Data warehouse works for long term reporting. There's a good best practices deployment guide which explains all about this in detail.
Customer Problem: the usual patterns for collecting long-term performance, event, and alert data in a common MOM 2005 deployment causes the data warehouse to grow to hundreds of GB sooner than the 395 day standard grooming interval. As a result, report generation time is adversely affected. It also makes the data warehouse less manageable from a pure size perspective.
Core Functionality
· Aggregates existing and new MOM 2005 data warehouse performance and alert data to provide daily and weekly summary data
· New reports for viewing aggregated data
· Allows customers to drastically reduce the volume of raw data in the data warehouse thus reducing the size requirements by up to 90%
· Allows customers to generate long-term reports based on a much smaller number of data rows thus satisfying the customer expectation that the Reporting Console is interactive
The reason that this summary reporting pack is significant is because MOM collects large amounts of information, for use in capacity planning. As MOM stores the data and configuration information in the MOM SQL Server 2000 database which can grow very large, particularly in environments where MOM is collecting significant amounts of data or monitoring a large number of computers. If you want to maintain an optimum database size, MOM periodically grooms data from the MOM database. As MOM grooms data, you can lose performance, alert, event, security, and capacity planning data, which is no longer available for MOM Reporting. You might want to maintain this historical data for a number of business reasons, such as long-term security auditing, long-term capacity planning, or other types of custom reporting.
To maintain historical MOM data while keeping the MOM database at optimum levels, you create a separate database to serve as a MOM data warehouse. You can periodically back up MOM data from the MOM database, restore it to a holding database, and then import that data to the MOM data warehouse. You would do this regularly before grooming the database to preserve data. Because the MOM data warehouse contains all of the historical MOM data, you can use it to run reports containing long-term data.
So the bottom line is: This reporting pack is useful. Go download it :-)