Getting More Out of Your Enterprise Reporter Infrastructure

Hello, my name is Neil Belfour. I'm one of the solution architects here at Quest Software. Today, we're going to do one of our Skills 101 sessions, Getting More Out of Your Enterprise Reporter Infrastructure. What we'll cover-- implementation tips, recommended configuration options to maximize performance whilst minimizing discovery time. Now when I talk about these implementation tips, I'm going to give scenario examples, because based upon the type of your discoveries, locations, regional coverage, infrastructure layout, those implementation tips would certainly be recommended based upon a lot of variables within your infrastructure. Feature overviews-- most popular features and reports and recommendations on how to organize them, how to align scheduled reports with discoveries. And some use cases we're going to touch upon-- improving security, regulatory compliance, audit reports, cleanup, pre-migration reports as well. So we're going to jump into the technical aspect of this because I know that's what everybody is here for today. Now everybody on this call, I'm not sure 100% your familiarity with Enterprise Reporter, but it's one of our applications we certainly get many questions on, what's the best way to go about implementing it, what's the best way to go about utilizing it. We're going to touch upon how it works because understanding how it works is just as important as understanding what would be best practices when it comes to implementing an install of this application. Now, when installing Enterprise Reporter, I'm only going to touch upon this for about 30 seconds or so, you can see that there's a lot of things that are required when installing Enterprise Reporter, from having to need administrative rights to be able to install the application, because we're going to create security groups within active directory. It's SQL back-ended, so it needs that as well. Plus, you're going to have to have further credentials, and we're going to cover that as we go through implementation. Within Enterprise Reporter, there are two consoles. There's a Configuration Manager console and a Report Manager console. We're going to start out with the Configuration Manager console. When you bring up the Configuration Manager console, it's going to default to clusters. Enterprise Reporter uses clusters. Now they're virtual clusters in an essence that you create. Now what dictates these clusters? Usually geographical proximity, how you want these discoveries to take place. Every cluster must use a discovery node. And what is a discovery node? Well, it's a member server that has our discovery service installed on it. That discovery node should be in geographical proximity of any place that you're doing discoveries. So if you had an East Coast and a West Coast datacenter, you would certainly need at least one discovery engine in each of those datacenters. Because when discovering information, the type of information, the quantity of information is really what's dictating a lot of this. So in the example that I have here, you can see I have an East Coast Datacenter and a West Coast Datacenter. Now the only cluster that I currently have enabled is local to my domain. But when you configure a cluster, you have to add discovery nodes to that cluster. This is simply a service. Now when installing this service, you have to take a couple of things into account. You'll notice it does use a service account. This service account, by default, needs to have rights to everything that you want to discover. You can add multiple nodes here. In the case of adding multiple nodes, we would load balance and fault tolerant those discoveries. Now, the key really comes in to the next step. Because when dealing with the next step is how you and can make or break your discoveries. I mean, I hear organizations sit there and tell me, well, the discoveries take too long. Well, how do you have this configured? There's a big difference between an Active Directory discovery and an NTFS discovery. An Active Directory discovery, even in a larger Active Directory which has 100,000 objects, pales in comparison if you're asking us to discover 50 million files off of a NetApp or an EMC. So you have to take into account what you want to discover. Also, SQL resources-- well, Enterprise Reporter with multiple nodes is going to discover the information more rapidly. Is your SQL Server capable of taking this information? Do we have those kind of resources on the SQL box? Are we using a SQL cluster? A lot of times, it's not just the configuration. There's reasons why there's bottlenecks. But this is where it starts-- discoveries. When dealing with discoveries, always the default discovery that 99% of all organizations are utilizing it for is Active Directory. When you create an Active Directory discovery, you would simply go to New Discovery. Now, when creating these discoveries, there are a couple of options that you can do. Now, Active Directory, once again, is one of the most mildest discoveries. There's always so much data that exists in Active Directory that would take time to be able to discover. But one of the tips that I always recommend, and I'm going to bring up an existing discovery here, simply on Active Directory, because most discoveries are the same. The only difference is the filter parameters that are being utilized for that type of discovery. But in this case, I gave it a name. I'm going to give it a scope-- Active Directory domain. Well, that's kind of a wide scope. No, that's not the problem. But we're going to discover user information, groups and members, computers, domains. This is the default of what we're discovering. But you'll notice there's an ellipsis here. Because if Active Directory discoveries are taking time, one of the first things I would check is this ellipsis. Because by default, we're going to use an automatic selection. We're going to just grab any domain controller within your infrastructure. Is there a possibility that we could grab a domain controller