System Reports

In this article

1. Feature Description

2. Setup

3. Viewing Reports

4. Custom Checks

5. Difference Reports

6. Email Settings

System reports is a daily or on-demand collection of NSX and vCenter objects. The inventory of objects is stored on the ReSTNSX appliance for viewing historical data and to provide trending information for capacity planning.

Minimum Release: 3.1 
Application: NSX-v, NSX T 
License: Enterprise 
Privilege level: Enterprise Admin (setup); Audit or higher for viewing

Setup To top ℹ️ By default, system reports are disabled. The system administrator must enable automatic collection.

To enable automatic collection, navigate to Admin > System > Global Options and enable System Report Auto-Refresh.

Additional options include:

Data Retention – The maximum number of days to retain the inventory data. Maximum setting is 180 days.

Delivery Times – Report collection and email delivery times.

• Default Time: Every 24 hours at midnight

• Daily: Select day(s) of the week and time

Viewing Reports To top

If auto refresh of inventory collection or if this is a new install of ReSTNSX, no data will be available for viewing. After midnight local time, the first set of reports will become available once.

ℹ️ If no reports are available, click the refresh button on the system report dashboard to initiate a collection. Note: Depending upon the size of the environment, this could take 5-10 minutes per data source.

Once the first system report is collected, a global reporting dashboard is presented with a breakdown of the data source types/versions; last data collection time stamps; micro-segmentation, network virtualization and compute trend charts.

This data is useful to understand the environment growth over the past 180 days to plan for expansion.

To launch a specific data source report, select the data source from the drop-down located at the top of the System Report Dashboard. This will launch a new dashboard and trends for the given data source. To retrieve a specific report, select the collection date and the NSX, vCenter statistics, services and object inventory will be displayed.

Each NSX object that was collected is shown as a snapshot of the configuration. Short and long-term graphs for each object are provided for comparison to previous collections.

Custom Checks To top

Beginning with ReSTNSX version 3.3, custom checks is a new feature of system reports to define one or more Central CLI commands to execute during an inventory collection. These commands are specific to a given data source.

ℹ️ CLI commands are limited to “show” commands

To setup a custom check, select the double check mark in the top right of any given data source report to open the settings window.

Add or remove CLI commands of interest.

ℹ️ To test a command prior to saving, click the magnifying glass. This will run the command against and provide a sample output.

On the next scheduled report collection, the configured commands will be run and the output stored in the report database.

Difference Reports To top

In addition to a single data source snapshot report, users can compare NSX manager configurations to each other. Comparisons can be made against different time stamps of the same data source or another. Select the data source under the Compare To drop-down to launch a difference report analysis.

ℹ️ Comparisons are available for like data sources – i.e. NSX-v to NSX-v and NSX T to NSX T. You cannot compare NSX-v to NSX T.

Once complete, the two reports are shown side-by-side for comparison.

Any differences between the environments will be highlighted in blue as shown below. In this example there are currently 37 dFW rules whereas there were 35 ten days ago. To display the differences, expand the section and review the color coded entries – green entries indicates items present in the latest report that were not in the compared-to while red entries indicates items missing from the latest report that were in the compared to report.

Email Settings To top ⚠️For automatic delivery of the system reports, system SMTP settings must be configured

To enable the system report summary emails to be sent, enable SMTP navigate to Admin > System > SMTP Settings

For each data source (NSX / vCenter pair), a separate email destination can be specified. Navigate to Reporting -> System -> Select a Data Source -> Click the Mail Icon with the cog wheel on the corner. These reports will be sent according to the system email schedule settings set in the previous step.

ℹ️ Report level SMTP settings require Enterprise Administrator privileges

Email Options

Email subject – Default information includes the Data Source Name, IP address/hostname and the collection date of the report.

Email destinations – comma separated values

Items to include –

• System Report: The most current report

• Difference Report: The most current and the previous report sent in a single email highlighting the inventory differences

Enabled – Turn sending emails for the given data source on or off

💡Instead of waiting for the next cycle to send the report in email, click the envelope above the report to send immediately.