Difference when exporting reports with "Report Definition" and "Report Template"

Products

• VMware Smart Assurance

Issue/Introduction

This article aims to show the difference between "Report Definition" and "Report Templates" when exporting reports as a best practice for ensuring healthy report trees. 

The use of "Report Definition" for report exports can lead to very large and bloated report trees when imported.

The size of the overall tree has a major impact on VMware Watch4net / Monitoring and Reporting (MnR):

• At login, the entire tree is downloaded, which can significantly slow the login time.
• Tomcat has to allow this amount of memory per session, this can crash Tomcat due to a lack of memory if there are many concurrent users.

Environment

Watch4Net/M&R-7.x

Cause

When exporting reports using the  Exports -> Report Definition  instead of  Exports > Report Template :
 

Report templates keep report links as-is while report definitions transform them into hard nodes. This can result in large amounts of repetition and significantly impacts the report tree size (creating very large XML files in the process). To minimize the report tree size there is an extensive use of report templates and links in the default reports.

Example on the size of export 'Dashboard' tree as template and definition:

-rw-r-----@  1 ABCD  Domain Users   291K Dec 17 13:22 Dashboards Template.xml
-rw-r-----@  1 ABCD  Domain Users    12M Dec 17 13:24 Dashboards Definition.xml
 

The below picture illustrates the links versus nodes on the report tree:

Resolution

When exporting reports, it is recommended to use the "Report Template" option rather than "Report Definition" in most cases. This will preserve the report links instead of converting them into unnecessary hard nodes as previously described.

If a report is required under "My Reports" or under another node, then the report can be copied and pasted in "Edit Mode" to the appropriate location. 

Alternatively, the entire ReportPack can be exported and imported into another system via "Administration -> ReportPacks".

Additional Information

Use case for exporting as "Report Definition":

If the intent is to transform the report links to hard nodes on specific reports, so it will be fully independent of the out of the box reports.