When will graphs be part of report writer?

One of the features I really wish Orion had was producing reports that included graphs. I know you can export the data the excel and do it but it would be nice to do it all from 1 location. E-health produced really nice pdf graphs.

Is anyone able to combine the utilization numbers for particluar links into 1 number? I'd like to produce a report showing an aggregate of all of our ISP links to management.

Thanks.

BB

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Accepted answers

Questionario

Hi jejones, it is not currently in the works I have been told... I assume this is because solarwinds has the impression not enough people are interested in it.

I have made a feature request for this, if you want to post a comment so there will be another one requesting this feature as well:

All comments

hple98

quote:Originally posted by BryanBecker

One of the features I really wish Orion had was producing reports that included graphs. I know you can export the data the excel and do it but it would be nice to do it all from 1 location. E-health produced really nice pdf graphs.

Is anyone able to combine the utilization numbers for particluar links into 1 number? I'd like to produce a report showing an aggregate of all of our ISP links to management.

Thanks.

BB

This is my wish too.

jonchill

We've started using Crystal Reports which is so much more flexible than what Orion currently offers and includes graphing which is what our board was looking for, if only Solarwinds would update report writer to include the Crystal engine then I think that would give us great reports and graphs.

Jon

IT Infrastructure Manager
Pilgrim Hospital
UK

lavelanet

Mee too.

BryanBecker

quote:Originally posted by jonchill

We've started using Crystal Reports which is so much more flexible than what Orion currently offers and includes graphing which is what our board was looking for, if only Solarwinds would update report writer to include the Crystal engine then I think that would give us great reports and graphs.

Jon

IT Infrastructure Manager
Pilgrim Hospital
UK

Jon....so you just export the data to excel or something and use crystal to create the graphs?

BB

mgshn

Is anyone able to combine the utilization numbers for particluar links into 1 number? I'd like to produce a report showing an aggregate of all of our ISP links to management.

Thanks.

BB

This question was posted over a year ago and I'm wondering if anyone has solved the problem yet. (It's something we really would like to do as well.

Regards,

Bob

BryanBecker

Nope....the reporting engine for Orion and Cirrus is still lacking basic graphing functions. This is a must have and wish they'd put some focus on it. Or better yet work with a 3rd party company like Crystal Reports and leverage their applications to give us what we want and need.

BB

Network_Guru

I briefly looked into Crystal Reports years ago and it is the best method for creating customized reports with graphs and pie charts.
Basically you create a reporting (read-only) account on your SQL DB that the reporting software connects to and has access to all the data in the Orion NetPerfMon DB. From there you just start creating reports <GRIN>
..... I know, it's really not as easy as it sounds.

tgoyette

I agree - this is something that would be GREAT to have

FormerMember

You're asking when graphs will be part of Report Writer? I'd like to turn that question back on you. What exactly do you need? Here's what I think I've been hearing from the community:

We need graphs in our reports
We need tables in our reports
We need to be able to schedule reports
We need to be able to export reports as Word/Excel/PDF/HTML files that we can send to others (e.g., managers, business owners)

Is this correct? Am I missing anything?

What if we allowed you to create custom view that had some combination of nework wide charts and tables, like a combination of our current reports and our current views? Then you could schedule that view to be created, exported, and then emailed. Would that be a good reporting solution?

What do you think? What else would would be needed? Desired? What are the business problems you're solving? The whole reporting issue is on my mind at the moment, so I'd very much like to hear what you think.

FormerMember

Hi Denny,

This sounds like a great idea, but we'd have to ensure to include the fields we selected in the report, i.e. if I create a report displaying the current availability of my mine sites then I'd love to see that in a bar graph above the raw data.

I'd also love to see pie charts displaying storage (total volumes) of each mine site, this would let me quickly compare them instead of looking at the raw data.

Bar charts representing all my WAN links (we have around 20) so I can easily compare the utilization of one against another.

Something else would be drillable reports online, this would allow me to drill into my availability and view which vendor had problems, then dril into that to view which nodes were causing problems, doing it this way would replace having to come out of each report and go into another one, although it works now it's a bit clumsy.

Although these are my ideas someone else may want a line graph where I want a pie chart, the report writer would have to be customizable enough to do this.

thanks for your time

Dave

savell

I use SQL Server Reporting Services to produce our graphical reports. I have posted an article on how to do this in the content sharing zone

Granted it's not trivial to get started, but once you get the first report done any others are easy to produce.

Dave.

Lane

Yes, all that Denny and Dave. Can we expect to see such improvements in version 9?

FormerMember

New reporting is not in Orion 9.0, but it's coming.

msheehan77

Afternoon,

Has there been any updates on this proposed solution. For my company this would be an excellent combination. Our CTOs (yes we have several) and our CIO want graphs not raw data. The graphs in the current views and network charts are excellent and I would like to see that in the Reports.

Thanks

-msheehan77

chris.lapoint

Afternoon,
Has there been any updates on this proposed solution. For my company this would be an excellent combination. Our CTOs (yes we have several) and our CIO want graphs not raw data. The graphs in the current views and network charts are excellent and I would like to see that in the Reports.
Thanks
-msheehan77

Just to ensure we fully understand the use-case, do your CTO and CIOs only need to see the graphs on your views or do they need the detailed data as well?

For example, would it be sufficient if we provided you the ability to email a PDF version of a view (all charts and graphs) set to a specific timeframe?

Or do you need to see charts and graphs together with the detailed table data (like that provided from Report Writer today)?

For other folks watching this thread, please chime in with your prioritization on this as well.

KenKasmar

We've used MS SQL Reporting Services to cover both executive/summary type of reporting generated & sent via email on a schedule as well as graphs inserted into Orion dashboards (via CustomHTML resource). Since Reporting Services is included in MS SQL 2005/2008 the only cost is someones time to build reports and such.

Questionario

oh and btw...

another reason why being able to use graphs in report writer...

for me a very big reason actually...

some "graphs" and tables are not really what I want/need. If I could just re-create the resource and make it looks exactly the same with report writer but filter more specific or add more details to it, that would be really neat!

To give a specific example:

I tried to recreate the volumes with high percent utilization. Now I have three custom properties on each volume, one is maxpercentage and the, one is minspace and the other one is nomonitor (boolean). Now I only want to display volumes where the utilization is below maxpercentage, the free space is above minspace and the nomonitor value is false.

On top of that I added two more columns with total space and free space.

My manager does not like it because it does not look like the original, it is not colored and there is no colored percentage bar. (It would be nice if you could set at what values the percentage bar changes colors and at what values the font changes to which color)

msheehan77

I agree with Questionario. Reason for graphs in reports is endless. having these options internal to orion cuts down on a number of headaches. I cant access DBA to create custom reporting for Orion data, their busy with my company's apps and customers. I don't have the budget to get an ITS DBA.

Here is another addition that I want/need to see; Reporting Access on the Web Front End. I would like to see it like this:

Have a web reporting portal. I would give this access to CTOs, Dev Managers, Department Heads and Corp IT Managers.
Within the portal/page they have a web interface very simular to what you see in NPM. They can check the servers or Apps they want to run reports on, set the timeframe and then you get the results. Simple, clean and easy. My team no longer has to be on the hook for getting the reports to the managers. We have many!

Then you have the PDF export, Excel Export and Raw Data Export for anything the managers need. This would be a helpful tool and a massive burden off my team's back. Everything the manager needs right at the Reporting Portal. Just need to grant the correct access. That access feature is already built into Orion. I can customize the menus and everything.

Keeping the reports to look and "feel" like the graphs in NPM are huge as well. My business customers have gotten use to seeing them and want the reports to reflect that.

Thanks,

msheehan77

jspanitz

Any word if this has made it into v10? I just inherited Orion and while the initial "wow" factor was high - based on the web portal visuals - the usability factor is the lowest for any product I've ever used.

Since this company is looking at me to evaluate their current solutions, I've got to recommend they look elsewhere base on the single fact that this thing can't spit out a report that a non-geek would want. Not to mention the numerous other glaring issues it has.

cmgurley

The crazy thing about this huge omission in NPM is that ipMonitor, the supposedly entry-level monitoring product, has great charts and scheduled & ad-hoc reports. In fact, I am currently finishing my migration from ipMonitor 10 to NPM 10, but think I may have to keep ipMonitor around just to maintain the reporting--that's nuts!

And if any SolarWinds staff want an example of the report I'm dying to get out of NPM, I'll be happy to e-mail examples of both the weekly CPU report (with comparison graphs of the current and previous week) for our production environment, and that of the bandwidth usage across our metro Ethernet ring links.

This would INCREDIBLY boost my satisfaction with NPM as a product and SolarWinds as a company if we could get enterprise-level reports to match our enterprise-level monitoring. Heck, just rip off what ipMonitor gives--I'd be happy.

Thanks,

Chris