Hi, I'd like use the automated dashboard reporting to use to send to infrastructure owners, but at the moment VMM adds a lot of white space to the either side of the actual data being presented, making it almost unreadable. I would like a way to customise the scope of the x-axis in the automated reporting? I have previously logged this with solarwinds support under case 484348, but was wondering if anyone else had managed to work around this issue? Please let me know, thanks, Luke.
Hi Luke,
One work around to customize your dashboard report graph view is to change the start & end dates that is being displayed on your widget's displayed graph and then create the dashboard report.
In the screenshot you shared, the date range is 4 days. For trend widgets you can edit the settings and change the Trailing Window (days) property from 30 to a lower number. In the screenshot below I set it to 1. The date range is calculated using this property.
End time = time of creating the report. Start time = end time - trailing window (in minutes) * 60000. Play around with this property and see if you can get a view that is more human readable for you. If you are interested in doing this for Top-N widgets then you would have to export the dashboard (From Explore ->Content->by type->Dashboards) Open the XML. Locate the widget you are interested in and edit the <trailingMinutes>5760</trailingMinutes> in the same fashion. Re-import the dashboard into your VMan appliance and run the dashboard report again.
Thanks Serena, very helpful!
While i have lost some granularity, the scope is much better.. is there a way of removing the white space on the left? or, is using the "Top N" widget not the best way to report on this dynamic data?
Configuring that range is pretty much your best bet at the moment with the Top N widgets. However, your question on whether the "Top N" widget is even the best way to report the data is an excellent question. In reality it depends on what you're looking to see from this report. Do you only care about the graph part of the widget? If so, then the best widget would be the "Performance Chart" widget. You can click on the arrow icon on the upper right hand of the widget to look at the query that returns the data that the "Top-N" widget is reporting. Using that you can create a custom "Performance Chart" widget that will give you a nice graph. For more examples of the kinds of queries that you can look at, try looking at the default saved searches provided with the product.
There are 3 that have to do with VM CPU utilization that you can take the queries and massage them to your needs.
Overall though, I do like the "Top-N" widget quite a bit, as it gives me the charts, and a high level overview of the top VMs that I care about. For my needs, the "Top-N" widget is perfectly fine to report on this dynamic data.
Thanks for your help serena, I'll give them a try 
