One place to go — customizable dashboard

Reporter provides a web-based dashboard that you can customize to present the most important aspects of your particular environment at-a-glance. Authorized users can immediately get a bird’s eye view of the virtual environment and drill down on any report or graph for more information.

Best of all, the dashboard is always up-to-date. That’s because Reporter collects information regularly and updates reports automatically. You don’t have to manually create and re-create reports, and users have immediate access to the most up-to-date information.

Different consumers — IT and business managers

Reporter provides both business and technical views of your virtual environment. You can view your environment in familiar VMware terms such as data centers, clusters and hosts. You can also categorize VMs according to the constructs of your business and view the environment from a business perspective. For example, you can view VMs by service-level agreement (SLA) or application type, or report on resource usage by department or business unit.

This business-oriented approach enhances communication with IT stakeholders and improves user satisfaction. You no longer have to spend hours or days manually extracting and filtering data. Chargeback is much easier, and uncategorized VMs can quickly be identified to control VM sprawl.

Enterprise reporting

Reporter provides documentation of your virtual infrastructure, as required by internal policies and external regulations. It also provides the reports your management demands — reports that effectively summarize all the detailed data about your virtual infrastructure to provide a clear and concise picture of resources, workload and utilization.

Reporter is built to accommodate your particular environment. It automatically discovers even large, dispersed environments and can span multiple vCenters. It captures all objects and setting and archives them in a Microsoft SQL Server repository. You can populate and update your CMDB (configuration management database) from this repository, to keep your CMDB in-sync with your virtual environment and eliminate unnecessary load on vCenter servers.

Reporter is also built to accommodate your particular reporting requirements. Reports are easily customizable and are generated automatically — eliminating labor-intensive, error-prone and ineffective manual processes and the delays and constant rework associated with them. With Reporter, you get the information you need in minutes, not hours or days.

Change management — who, what, where, when and how

The virtual environment consists of many moving parts. Changes occur regularly, initiated by VMware itself or by one of any number of admins, in any number of locations. Reporter keeps track of it all. So you can report on the current state of your virtual infrastructure or any point in the past. You can analyze configuration drift and track objects over their lifecycle.

Reporter captures the "who, what, where, when and how" of every change. With this audit data, you can improve change workflows and investigate problematic changes.

You can also speed problem resolution. When performance declines or a VM is no longer working, the first thing you need to know is "what changed?" Reporter provides instant visibility of changes that have occurred in your environment. So you can easily isolate the root cause of performance slowdowns and availability issues.

Capacity planning

What is the workload across your entire virtual infrastructure? Are you under or over when it comes to resource utilization? Reporter answers these critical questions. It provides trend analysis so you can see average load, peaks and bottlenecks. It identifies spare resources and helps you optimize VM placement and maximize consolidation ratios.

Reporter also helps you "stay ahead of the curve" by forecasting when CPU, memory and storage utilization will reach your defined targets. You can even perform "what-if" analyses to evaluate the effect of adding or removing hosts and VMs on utilization. And when new hardware purchases are necessary, Reporter provides the justification — and confidence — you need to go to management for funding.

Veeam Business View integration

Reporter integrates with Veeam Business View™ to provide business-focused management of your virtual infrastructure. Business View uses custom attributes to categorize VMs based on business criteria such as business unit, department, location, purpose, SLA, etc. Business View helps you prioritize resource allocation, perform chargeback and control VM sprawl. Learn More