Report help needed

I'm doing a report that basically shows the Average Receive, Average Transmit, Max Receive & Max Transmit utilisation on certain links.

But I've done the report in Report Writer and Web-Based and between the 2, I get different results for the Average columns. I believe the Report Writer version is showing the correct utilisation as when I refresh the Web-Based report the Average figures will change. Each are showing data for the Last Month.

This is what I get in Report Writer

This is what I get in Web-Based

Does anyone have any ideas as to what I'm doing wrong?

This is my Web-Based table view

Thanks!

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Accepted answers

mesverrum

I just tested it in my lab and if i set up exactly the same report in web and report writer and look at exactly the same time windows and launch them immediately one after the other they seem consistent. I'd wager it could be just some slight difference in how they are calculating the time window you are defining, like the report writer is using between and has a very granular time, maybe the web writer is slightly different and is using greater than to start it's date range. It is kind of a lot more work to see exactly the SQL of what the web tool is trying to look up, but you can compare them directly by turning on the hubble debug tool and pulling out the sql when the report runs.

As far as "correct" goes i think the simplest way is to say they are both correct, just only internally consistent. Last month in web reports is likely consistent from month to month, and last month in reportwriter would also be consistent with itself, but if you compare them against each other there may be 1 poll different between them which could skew your number, but like i said in my lab with back to back reports running at the same time I got the same results from them both.

All comments

grantallenby

I cant help with this unfortunately but I too have had the same issue many times, so I'm keen to find out what it is.

dgsmith80

Hi superfly99 it probably has something to do with the time/date data being different between Report Writer and Web Reports.

mesverrum

I've noticed people with this problem before, at a glance it seemsthat for your "average percent utilization" columns you selected the current average instead of selecting it from the historical traffic data. This value would update every 10 minutes and is the average over the polling cycle. The clue is that the icon between the average percent columns and the Max columns is different. If you had selected the average from the historical tables it would have that same icon with the little list on it.

superfly

I don't believe that's the case. I have it set for Last Month (1/1/18 - 31/1/18).

Almost every time I refresh the Web-Based report, the Average figures change.

superfly

Yeah I'd noticed that as well but I couldn't find how to get that icon on my other columns. So I deleted the Average Columns and then modified the Max columns to show the average. This is now what I get.

I then added in the MAX colums again and now the MAX figures have changed!

My table layout now

The Average figures are now closer to Report Writer but still not the same.

But I looked at the Report Writer figures today and noticed that they've now changed as well.

I think the reason why Report Writer's figures changed is due to the rollout up settings.

But that still doesn't explain why the 2 reports don't show the same results.

Might have to log a support call for this unless someone has the magic answer? Thanks!

mesverrum

So to address your question about the avg/peak values, to get the correct ones you would go to the add columns, make sure to click the button on the left that says interface traffic history and check the boxes like this:

Then you need to set the aggregation on that columns like this:

Then you go back to the column picker, add in the same two columns again, but this time we set the aggregation to max

As far as why the report writer and the web interface are different I wouldn't know that of the top of my head, are you using an out of the box report from the report writer? I'd have to look at the logic there and see if there's something different. I've run into those kind of situations in the past and it usually boils down to something like the report writer is using a slightly different window of times or there's some kind of filtering being applied that people didn't notice. I've figured it out for a couple reports in the past but it always requires seeing the complete setup of both reports to find the small differences.

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superfly

Thanks for your assistance. That's exactly what I did. So now the historical is set to the Average view

But as you can see, now my MAX values are no longer correct as they don't have the historical icon anymore.

And now when I re-run my report, you can see the MAX values are changing. They are different to the ones I posted up before whilst I've not modified the report at all.

I've created both reports (Web-based and Report Writer) from scratch.

Thanks!