Get more from Veeam Change Management Reports!

Veeam Reporter Enterprise 3.0 is a very robust reporting tool for you VI environment utilizing Visio, Excel, Word, and PDF formats. One specific report that has had a big impact for VMware administrators is the Excel Change Management report. This report allows administrator to compare their VI environment from two points in time by an ad-hoc method or have changes e-mailed to them automatically when they occur. Within the Change Management report there are four worksheets (Summary, Virtual Machines, Storage, and Data.) The first three worksheets are cut and dry as they show exactly what you would expect them to from their title. The fourth (Data) worksheet is where the true hidden power of this report exists. At first glance there is a copious amount of data that can be initially intimidating but once administrator understand how the data is presented and how it can be manipulated the reporting possibilities are limitless. Below is a walkthrough of how to generate a Datastore capacity trend report from the information contained within the data tab. Once this process and methodology is understood you’ll be generating crucial reports in no time. Also, everything that is outlined here can also be applied to the Raw Data Analysis report within Veeam Reporter Enterprise 3.0 to extend your reporting capabilities even further!

The first step is to log in to the Reporter Enterprise 3.0 GUI and generate a Change Management Report.

Now you have an excel document for the baseline of this report. Click the “data” tab and let’s begin!

In the “data” worksheet the columns can be sorted to reveal the exact data needed for the Datastore trend report. Click the object type column and then select only the sharedstorage field. Then click the Property name column and select Free Space (GB) numeric.(While sorting the columns take some time to work with these fields to explore some of the possibilities you can get from this report.)

Once the sorting has been done the worksheet will look similar to this:

The next step is to create new worksheets for the expanded report. I have created two worksheets and imported the sorted data into one of the new worksheets (SCT DATA). (I have also sorted a specific Datastore COLDEM03 out by selecting it in the NAME column.)

Now in the other empty worksheet (SCT REPORT) insert a pivot table using the data from the other newly created data worksheet (SCT DATA)

Once the pivot table has been created in the report worksheet (SCT REPORT) open the PivotTable Field List and sort the fields as shown below.

Thus giving you a pivot table that looks like this.

Create a Line chart from the pivot table data and you’re almost done!

Now you have a Line chart that you can edit and format it to clean up its view and you’re done with a similar result to what’s pictured below.

Now that you have seen an example of how you can utilize the data that Veeam Reporter Enterprise 3.0 provides, sign up for an evaluation and try it for yourself! Many of our current users are working with these reports and have created their own report to suite their company’s needs with reports ranging from ones like this to customized chargeback reports.