Exsecutive Management Team Reports

Question

Okay, so I am sure that I cannot be the only one who has faced this problem.  My executive management team has requested to see monthly availability reports for all of our "email servers" and "logon servers" (forgive them....three letter titles tend to diminish technological vernacular).  I am already pulling average availability for all of my domain controllers but can anyone tell me how I can group the availability of those servers and take an average availability for the group?

Example:

DC01 100% for the month

DC02 80% for the month

DC03 50% for the month

DC04 has 100% for the month

Management team gets a report saying "Availability of Logon Servers Last Month was 82.5%"

Lnavin · Answer

This maybe out in left field, but you could create a custom SQL monitor which polls the Orion DB for the status of each of your DC's.  Count the total nodes and return that to APM.  Your actual downtime only occurs when the count equals 0.

The SQL could look something like this.

Select Count(node id) where node.status = Up and node.id in (123,274,738)

You will have to work on the actual tables and fields but I think that will work.

bashley · Answer

Yeah, this works great for most of my conditions.  Unfortunately, it doesnt work so great with Domain Controllers.  With my Domain Controllers being clustered but with no specific cluster IP to pull availability on, the availability statistics of this get skewed a little.  If one domain controller has an monthly availability of 80% and the rest were 100% the availability for this group will be under 100% even though all functionality is still there.  For this particular instance I almost need a conditional availability report where availability only decreases when all domain controllers are down.  Any ideas?

borgan · Answer

One option would be to create a Yes/No type custom property (for example, "dcserver") and assign the property to the servers, This would create a group. Then use Report Writer to construct a report that queries the Availability field and uses the AVERAGE function, along with the dcserver field. This should yield the average availability of the servers in the group over any designated time period (set on the Time Frame tab).

Does that sound about right?