Manage TFS reports, data warehouse, and analysis services cube
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If you added SQL Server Reporting Services at installation, then your on-premises Team Foundation Server (TFS) deployment is configured with a data warehouse and SQL Server Analysis Services cube. If you didn't add these services previously and want to add them now, see Add reports to a team project.
The reporting warehouse is a traditional data warehouse that consists of a relational database and an Analysis Services database.
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All reportable data from all team projects that are defined in all project collections for a TFS deployment is written to a single relational database (Tfs_Warehouse). Data from that warehouse is then processed and written to the Analysis Services cube (Tfs_Analysis). Collecting data into a single data warehouse supports reporting across team projects and project collections. To learn more, see Components of the TFS data warehouse.
With SQL Server Reporting Services, you gain access to many default Excel and SQL Server Reporting Services reports. These reports aggregate metrics from work items, version control, test results, and builds. See Create, customize, and manage reports for Visual Studio ALM.
Without these services, you can create status and trend charts from work item queries directly from the operational data stores.
View, add, update, or customize reports or report functionality
You use work item fields to track data for a work item type, to define the filter criteria for queries, and to design reports. To support reporting, you can add fields or change the attributes of existing fields. When you add or modify fields, you will want to apply systematic naming conventions to make sure that data is logically grouped into folders in the cube. To learn more, see Add or modify work item fields to support reporting.
To bulk add or update reports for a team project, see Upload reports to a team project.
To manage Reporting Services Reports, see Reporting Services Reports (SSRS)Upload reports to a team project.
Depending on the process template that you use to create your team project, you may have several reports already defined. You can customize these reports additionally or create new reports. These reports may contain new data fields that you added to work item types. See Create, customize, and manage reports for Visual Studio ALM.
Manage permissions to view and create reports
To create reports that access data in the cube, you must add team members to the TFSWarehouseDataReader role. To view or refresh data within a report, you must add team members to one or more of the Report Server roles. See Grant permissions to view or create reports in TFS.
A user who has permission to view the data in the warehouse can view data for all team projects that are hosted in all team project collections in the TFS deployment. There is no way to limit access to a team project or collection.
Manage and troubleshoot the data warehouse and analysis services cube
You can manage the warehouse and analysis services cube to address the following scenarios:
Correct errors that block processing of the data warehouse. Schema conflicts occur when a set of attributes for reportable fields differs across team project collections. Schema conflicts block updated data from being moved into the warehouse and the cube. You must correct all schema conflicts to unblock processing and to update reports with current data.
See Resolve schema conflicts that are occurring in the data warehouse.
Update the data warehouse or cube on demand. Resolve a problem with reports that are not up to date or contain missing data. To resolve a problem with reports that do not update or contain missing data, you may have to process the data warehouse manually. Also, you can troubleshoot errors that appear in the event viewer for an application-tier server that are related to warehouse processing jobs.
See Manually process the TFS data warehouse and analysis services cube.
Re-create the schemas, and rebuild the data warehouse databases. Rebuild the warehouse and cube after you move, restore, rename, or fail over the data-tier server for Team Foundation. To access high-level reports, you must rebuild the data warehouse whenever you move, restore, rename, or fail over the data-tier server.
Modify the refresh frequency of the data warehouse or cube. Change the refresh frequency or other process control setting for the warehouse or cube. The default properties for the warehouse are set when TFS is installed, but you can later change the default values to respond to changing requirements. Two properties that you might want to change are the frequency with which the data is updated in the data warehouse and the security settings that control user access to the data warehouse.
See Change a process control setting for the data warehouse or Analysis Services cube.
Q & A
Q: Where can I learn more about reportable attributes for each field?
A: A default set of fields appears in the relational warehouse database or the cube. These fields have a reportable attribute value of Detail, Dimension, or Measure. To look up the definition for a reportable field, see Reportable fields reference for Visual Studio ALM.
Q: What are the relationships and dependencies between SQL Server and TFS?
A: See Understanding SQL Server and SQL Server Reporting Services.
Q: Can I add or remove data from a team project collection from the data warehouse?
A: You can enable and disable data that flows into the data warehouse by editing the reporting configuration for your team project collections. After you add a report server to your deployment, you can configure reporting resources for your team project collections and the projects in those collections. See Manage team project collections.
Q: How do I add new data types to the data warehouse?
A: You can add new data types to the data warehouse by implementing a warehouse adaptor. To learn more, see Data Warehouse extensibility.