After the release of App-V 5.0, one of the first features I wanted to check out was the reporting.  In App-V 4.x it wasn’t particularly accessible and therefore was left generally unused.  The App-V dashboard improved things somewhat, but still, I’m not sure how widely that was implemented.

If you’ve carried out an installation or read through the App-V 5.0 documentation you’ll know there is now a dedicated reporting server that needs to be installed and the app-v client needs configuring. Once finishing the install you’ll be expecting a new funky dashboard with all the reporting data presented to you, right? Nope. The reporting server is there with data being populated, but you’ll have to create your own setup to query and display the data.

OK, so can we go about that? I’m not a DBA but I’ve managed to put together a method to query the data in a way that can be extended to report whatever you’d like, as long as you can understand some SQL. But first, the setup of the App-V 5.0 client:

App-V 5 client, setup for Reporting:

Assuming you’ve installed the App-V 5.0 client, launch a powershell command prompt, and import the powershell module by typing:

> import-module appvclient

If you haven’t already setup your publishing server, type

> Add-AppvPublishingServer -Name {Your Label} -URL {http://hostname:port}
replace the parts within {}

To configure reporting, type

> Set-AppvClientConfiguration -ReportingEnabled 1 -ReportingServerURL {http://hostname:port}  -ReportingStartTime 0 -ReportingRandomDelay 5 -ReportingInterval 5

see this technote for an explanation of the parameters

As per the earlier configuration the App-V client will upload its data at a set interval. To force the upload of data, type:

> Send-AppvClientReport

You can verify your configuration by typing the following command, or get help:

> Get-AppvClientConfiguration
> help appvclient

 

Before starting to experiment with App-V client uploads and query data from the SQL server you should be aware that the SQL server will only process uploaded data at a set interval, by default that’s once a day at midnight.

To see the schedule, connect to your SQL server using SQL Management Studio, expand the SQL Server Agent node, expand Jobs and view the properties of ProcessAppVReportingDataJob.

The Schedules Page will show you how often this is set to run. To run this manually; expand the Databases node, expand AppvReporting, expand Programmability and then expand Stored Procedures. Now if you right click on dbo.spProcessClientReport you will be able to select “Execute Stored Procedure”

 

That brings to a close Part 1. You should have an installed App-V 5 client and it will now be configured to report back to the Reporting Server. You’ll also have a bit of an understanding of when the data gets uploaded and when the SQL server will process it.

In Part 2, I’ll look at how to query the data from the SQL server and display the results over your intranet.