To be a rockstar administrator of an OpenView installation, you’ll need to be comfortable working with the raw data in the OpenView database. This article is going to cover the basics of the OVO database and which tables you should be familiar with.

To begin, connect to your OVO database using SQL Server Management Studio.

The main tables that we are going to be looking at are:

OV_MS_Annotation – The table that stores annotations for any message in the console
OV_MS_Message – The table that stores all the messages and their related information
sto_ov_managednode – The table that stores all the data on the nodes managed by this management server
sto_ov_nodegroup – The table that stores all the data about the node groups for this management server

OV_MS_Message – Many of the fields in this table are self explanatory and we won’t be going into much detail here. The key fields/columns in this table are:

  • Id – The guid of the message. This value corresponds to what you see on the General tab of the Message Properties dialog box.
  • State – This corresponds to the current state of the message and is an integer value and the available options are: 2 – Unowned, 3 – Owned , and 4 – Acknowledged.
  • TimeOfStateChange/TimeOfStateChangeTimeStamp – The time corresponding to the last time that the message’s state change
  • NodeName – The guid of the node that this message is for.
  • MessageGroup – The message group for this message. Corresponds to the value also viewable in the console.
  • Object – The object for this message. Corresponds to the value also viewable in the console.
  • Application – The application for this message. Corresponds to the value also viewable in the console.
  • Severity – The severity level of this message. This is an integer value and the available options are: 2 – Normal, 4 – Warning, 8 – Minor, 16 – Major, and 32 – Critical.
  • Text – This is the body of the message text for the message.

OV_MS_Annotation

  • MessageId – This is the guid for the corresponding message that this annotation is for.
  • OrderNumber – The sequential number corresponding to the order of the annotations.
  • Text – The annotation text.
  • UserOfAnnotation – The user that created the annotation.
  • TimeCreated/TimeCreatedTimeStamp – The time the annotation was created.

sto_ov_managednode

  • object_text – A text field containing all the data about the node including the AgentId, caption, and CommunicationPath if necessary.
  • name – The guid for the node. Also referred to as NodeName in other tables.

sto_ov_nodegroup

  • object_text – A text field containing all the data about the node group including the description and caption.
  • name – The guid for the node group.

Stay tuned for Part 2 as we start talking about how to write queries to pull the data that you need.

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