Changes to SMS Status Reporting and Report Generation

In SMS 1.2 In SMS 2.0 Notes
SMS-generated events are the basis of status reporting. Service and thread components generate two categories of status messages as they carry out their tasks: flow-of-activity messages and exceptional messages (such as error messages). Status messages are stored in the SMS site database.

You can choose to view all messages or only the exceptional messages.

You can view SMS events (in chronological order) in the Events window. Status summaries appear in the SMS Administrator console. In the console tree, the overall health of your components or site systems is flagged with a red, yellow, or green indicator, which is based on thresholds you set. The status summary of each component or site system appears in the details pane. For each of your sites, the Site Status portion of the SMS Administrator console tree displays two items: Component Status and Site System Status.
To view details of any one SMS event, you select the event and choose Properties from the File menu. For the details of the status summary for any single component or site system, you double-click the summary in the details pane to view the individual status messages in the Status Viewer. The SMS 2.0 Status Viewer is similar in appearance to the Windows NT Event Viewer.

You can manipulate the data display in the Status Viewer. For example you can change the sort order, hide or rearrange columns, or apply filters.

You can generate alerts from SMS Events. You can convert SMS messages to Windows NT events, which you can view in the Windows NT Event Viewer.

Alerts no longer exists.

 
New feature Status summaries provide a quick overview of the health of your site.

Site Status displays status health indicators based on thresholds you specify and the contents of the Component Status summary and Site System Status summary.

 
You cannot print or export status information. You can print status information, and you can export status information to a tab-delimited file for inclusion in a spreadsheet or text document.  
To use Crystal Reports for your SMS data, you must first generate a view of the SMS database. Crystal Info accesses the SMS site database directly.

The views that were created by smsview in SMS 1.2 are supported for your old reports, until those reports can be converted to the new data access methods.

 
When you want to view a report, you have to run it first. You can explicitly re-generate a report at any time.

Reports are generated according to a schedule you set. When you open a report, you immediately see the report data.

 
You load, edit, and run reports in a separate Reports Designer window. You view reports in the SMS Administrator console. You can also schedule reports to be created and distributed in HTML.

You can also schedule reports of interest to specific user groups or to your end users and publish them on your internal web.

 
New feature You can set security on a per-report basis by assigning permissions to generate or view reports to specific Windows NT users and user groups.  

Related Topics

Topic Link

SMS 1.2 to SMS 2.0 Changes