Report for Min/Max/Avg Packet Loss Over Time

magicjuanhunglo

I would like to build a table that shows the Min/Max/Average Packet Loss of all Nodes (or specific nodes) over a period of time.  Say, last hour, last day, or last week.  I am not seeing a clear way to accomplish this and everything I have  tried thus far doesn't seem to work or if it does,  is not accurate.  Not sure where I  am messing this up.

The table would be similar to the below example:

Node Name     |     Min Packet Loss     | Max Packet Loss     |     Avg Packet Loss

This would be adjusted to reflect the needed time frame (over the last hour, day, week, etc.)  Then I can break it down further be specifying nodes by Vendor or Machine Type, etc.

I have tried building a Custom Table to display this, but its not coming out as intended.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

mesverrum

Packet loss is tricky one because it isn't measured the same way as most other metrics.  Orion does packet loss as the rolling average of the last 10 pings, when the node is up it only sends a single ping every 2 minutes (assuming default settings) and if the node doesn't answer a ping it goes into fast polling and sends a single ping every 10 seconds for the next 2 minutes.  Because of all this the values in your db will always be a multiple of 10 and under most circumstances the "min" and "max" will be deceiving.  If the node ever went down during the period of the report it will have gone to 100% packet loss, and if it didn't go down then you would just a value that reflects the number of pings that went by before the device started responding again, so if we missed both pings for 20 seconds the "max" percent would be 20, even though you may have actually had 100% packet loss but it only lasted for 20-29 seconds.

So all this basically means I would discourage you from taking much interest in min or max packet loss because they really don't mean what the average person thinks it means if they saw a report like this.  The average can be helpful, but you still have to understand what it is showing you.  With that said, to create what you asked for I would do this:

Create a custom table, set the datasource to whatever nodes we are interested in or leave it as all nodes if you want everything.  On the column picking page that comes up choose Caption, then go to the box on the left and scroll down looking for Response Time History, check the box for percentloss then add column.

We will have to hit the + sign and add that same column in two more times because the UI doesn't normally want to let you pick a single column more than once. You should have this

For each instance of percent loss we need to rename them and change the data aggregation method appropriately,

Submit that and set the time range to whatever you need, I'll be using last 7 days for my example

Name the report and you should be able to preview it and see something like this

Note that like I said, my min is mostly 0 or 100 because the nodes were up at some time this week or they were down the whole time, the only case where that would not be true is if they actually dropped packets but never went down at all during the window, my max is either 0 or 100 for the same reasons, and the average percent loss really indicates that about .02% of the time this week that APC04 node was down (or maybe I really did just drop some small amount of packets throughout the week but this report will have a hard time showing me that).

-Marc Netterfield

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