In many of system center products, you will have dashboard and reporting. Dashboard are usually use by administrators and IT team and people who are doing operating and maintenance in order to have a clear view of what is going on and have a quick access to resources that they are using. Each person could setup different dashboard, depend on their need and usage. And due to time you might need to change dashboard style and add or remove dashboards. For example, IT team might add CPU and memory usage to dashboard of System Center Operation Manager to monitor operation of each computer when company just setup and new upgrade been perform and once everything is fine. Then they might remove these from dashboard and might add network usage monitoring to dashboard. It could be case that a group of tester use operation manager to monitor and test software usage and another team monitor network usage and they setup different dashboards. In System Center Configuration Manager, during Operating System deployment, the team might add deployment status in main dashboard and once this process finished replace it with some other dashboard. Dashboard acted as a friend and IT assistance to help IT team and anyone who uses product to be able to monitor, manage and access resources that needed in one place easily and quickly and there are several ways to arrange dashboard.

Reporting could use by IT team to view what been happened, but it is mainly for discussion with other team and explain what been happened and what is going on in organization in certain period of time. Report basically help IT team to explain to management or other department about what they been doing and help decision makers to make right decisions.

For example, when you add CPU usage in dashboard , you will have real time monitoring status of CPU of PCs that you are monitoring in real time and when something happen you could see it in real time and take action. Another example is if you add deployment status in your dashboard, you will monitor in real time how status of deployment is and what is going on in that moment and from dashboard you could decide which phase you are in and when you could proceed next. If you generate report, you could show it to other teams or managers and tell them how everything goes and also show if anything happened how it been handled. Basically, report is show something in past and static, while dashboard show something in real-time and dynamic. If you want to conduct meeting with management team as IT team, you should generate report. But if you want to check something in real time or discuss current or latest issue with other IT team or in your own team, you should use dashboard.

Both report and dashboard are important in IT operation and for IT teams. You have several options and ways to generate report or arrange dashboard. The important point is using dashboard and report in right place and right time for right people.