After you are connected to SQL Views, you can use any third-party reporting tools, such as Microsoft Excel and Business Objects Crystal Reports, to make reports and charts using data from Operations Center. SQL Views uses views to make data accessible to these tools.
Some basic instructions are included here to get you started using Excel or Crystal Reports to build reports. For more information, consult the documentation for these products.
To create reports, you might need to enter some SQL statements. It is your responsibility to ensure the SQL statement syntax is correct. For example, when using Excel, it is necessary to manually enter the statement. Otherwise, Excel enters column names without enclosing them in parentheses, which results in invalid statement because the dot (.) is a keyword. An example of the correct syntax for such a column name is:
.CI.HARDWARE.CPU.MODEL
With regard to SQL statements, SQL Views accepts the following two time stamp formats. These formats are required for specifying the start time and end time of a historical query.
yyyy-MM-dd-HH.mm.ss Example: 2006-05-01-00.00.00 yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss Example: 2006-05-01 00:00:00
The following sections review how to integrate Operations Center data into reports via Excel or Crystal Reports: