Another Q&A with some reporting questions I’ve got from customers. If you have a question, just send it out to QandA@open-horizons.net.
Q: You mentioned that there are additional reporting domains available for ZMM and ZAV, where can I find these.
A: Just sending out the URL would obviously work but it might be good to know how to just get to the ZENworks Reporting (or any other category) Cool Solutions pages.
From the novell.com home page select Communities in the top menu and then User Communities. This will get you to the main coolsolutions page. The Technical How-to will show a few product categories but it might be better to look at the Categories box on the right side, this will show categories like Service Desk and ZENworks Reporting.
Q: I’ve seen that you are using the location in the reporting demo, but how can I fill that Location information automatically?
A: In the demos I do, I’ll often pick the Location from the “ZENworks System/Managed Device Status/Location” to build a report that shows the number of devices for each location and with that I’ll show how many there are for each Platform or Operating System (See figure 1). With this demo I’ll use the Location field that is shown on the summary tab for the device. This field can be filled during the device registration and can be manually edited. There is however no easy way to modify this field automatically during the device inventory.
If you dynamically want to gather information about the device location we need to get this by using the ZENworks Inventory scan. Inventory allows us to gather Site, Department, Building etc. by using the Collection Data Form, here we can get this information automatically by pulling the info from the registry of from an Environment Variable.
Within ZCC this information will show up on the inventory page but these are not linked with the location field that gets filled during registration. Obviously we can also use these inventory fields when we generate reports within ZENworks Reporter, and we can combine information from different database tables. In this case we could get the “Site” info from the inventory device tables and get the OS Product name from the Managed Device Status.
Q: That’s interesting, how does collecting the Site information work?
A: As mentioned you can do this by using the Collection Data Form. Some people think that this is a manual process but you can use this to automatically get information from the registry or from environment variables. To get this information without user-interaction use the Autofill option. When you enable this ZCC will ask you where to obtain this information. In this dialog box you can point to a registry location or environment variable where the information can be obtained, as shown in figure 2.
(Incomplete)
First published in OHM26 - July 2014