First, reporting.
Via the old and still existing report writer in outside of the web interface, we can easily take a canned report, look at the custom SQL elements, and easily modify it to do simple things like "Only display nodes where blah_custompropertyfield ='$applicable_value'.
Or for a more precise example in the modern db structure where custom properties have been moved to their own new table:
something along the lines of "where NodesCustomProperties.ReportGroup1='1' (Or Yes / True, whatever).
This functionality was destroyed with the new web based reporting, and the report building interface,
even though there's sort of some ways you're supposed to be able to do report limitations.
To date, I can't create a report to show 95th Percentile Historical Utilization in the web reporting interface
that could be limited to any custom property via the web ui despite a couple of different calls into support (lame).
Now views, more specifically management of the multiple object resource.
I have a whole set of views I created with 24 hour, 7 day, and 30 day graphs split out onto separate
tabs for 3 different types of circuits (interfaces) designated by custom properties. Each tab has
4 graphs on it, each graph shows either 24 hours, 7 days, or 30 days.
It's pretty easy to build the views, but maintaining them is going to be a nightmare, because it's not based on multiple limitations.
For one given graph, I need to limit it by interface custom property and something like Nodes.Caption like 'blah%'.
Ideally, need to be able to do this for any graph or report, and while tons of great stuff (love the new alerting interface), reporting is really, really, bad,
and management of graphs on random custom views needs to be hands free like it could be for the old reporting (for instance).
The selection is easy but as you add network elements updating every single graph is super tedious. The goal is to have a dynamic view of the network that updates itself as you add elements with the appropriate custom or other properties.
Peter
