“Cannot initialize report” Error When Running SCOM Reports

Yesterday, I noticed I get this error when I tried to run some reports in the System Center Central Health Check Reports MP in my home SCOM 2007 R2 environment:

“Value of 01-Jan-01 12:00:00 AM” is not valid for ‘value’. ‘Value’ should be between ‘MinDate’ and ‘MaxDate’.

I then realised I get exactly the same error on any reports which contain datetime pickers in the report.

Long story short, after spending some time troubleshooting this issue, including updating my SCOM 2007 R2 environment from CU5 to CU6 as this blog post has suggested:

SCOM 2007 R2 – Reporting : Value of ’1/01/0001 12:00:00 AM’ is not valid for ‘Value’. ‘Value’ should be between ‘MinDate’ and ‘MaxDate’

CU6 update didn’t fix my issue. The issue end up being the regional setting on my SCOM all-in-one box (RMS, databases and reporting server).

I live in Australia, so normally, I would set the language format to English (Australia). However, when I create a new management pack using SCOM 2007 R2 Authoring Console on a computer set to use English (Australia) language format, by default, 2 language packs are created in the management pack: ENU (English United States) and ENA (English Australia) and default language pack is set to ENA. I don’t always remember to change the default and delete ENA language pack for every management pack I’m working on. So,to work around this issue, on the 2 machines that I run Authoring Console from (one being the all-in-one SCOM server), I set the language format to English (United States) and modify the short date format from default M/d/yyyy to dd-MMMM-yy so I’m not confused with the month and day when I read a date. this is the cause of the error in SCOM reports.

Default English (United States) formats:

Modified formats:

After I changed the format back to default on my SCOM server, the reports started running! Since all the SCOM server roles are on the same box, I can’t confirm if which components (i.e. RMS, SSRS etc.) relies on the default language formats.