Help please with building Reports

Ok, So I'm new at this software and have little to no SQL Query building experience but have been tasked with building several reports on Bandwidth Utilization and CPU and Memory utilization. The CIO wants to track trends in bandwidth utilization so that he can present documentation to the CFO whenever he needs to upgrade a circuit. What I need help with is this: I need to make a monthly report showing bandwidth utilization on a per hour of the day basis of the entire previous month. I need to graph it on a per node basis showing the peaks and troughs of the bandwidth spikes for every day in order to build a trend. I am trying to find someway to take the averages of, for example, the Mondays of every month, per hour, then the Tuesdays, per hour, etc. in order to narrow down the graphs to single day trends on specific nodes.

I'm not sure how clear I am on this but hopefully someone out there can offer some insight on this.

Thanks in advance

Norman

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kweise

Norman,

Probably the best way to get started with writing reports is to view the Report Writer video tutorial on the SolarWinds website. You can find it on the Recommended tab here: www.solarwinds.com/.../tutorials.aspx

One thing to mention that you probably don't want to hear - you can't create graphs in Orion reports. It's a feature that has been requested often over the years but hasn't made it to the product yet. There are posts on here from others who have created graphs using third party tools such as Crystal Reports or SQL Reporting Services. There is a pretty good paper in the Content Exchange area about creating reports using the SQL Reporting Services (you can find it here: )

Hope this helps get you started. Once you get going and have specific questions about a report, post your question here with a screen shot of your Filter Results tab (or whatever portion of the report you have a question about.) You will normally get some pretty good guidance on how to proceed if you get stuck.

gbutler

Here is an idea.

The scheduler will send a weekly/monthly/daily graph.

Its pretty simple in that what you do is go the the view you want... customize it using the graphing functions in the URL (i.e. set it on hourly, last 24 hours,...etc.).

Then cut and paste the URL into the scheduler.

The scheduler will send you that graph on the defined timing you set.

glenn.

Here is one I set up:

2010-05-05_131027.jpg

nbjeter3

I like this idea over trying to manually build the trend graphs from data in a dumped Excel sheet thank you. I have the small problem of interpreting your solution though. Where do I go to build the views in the Web interface of directly on the server itself? If directly on the server which application? I've figured out some rudimentary layouts in the report builder but nothing to allow me to build graphs. You stated copying the URL , so I'm guessing this is done through the web interface though I cannot find where. Can you offer a bit more insight? As stated above, I'm just now learning the software, it kind of landed in my lap for me to figure out lol.

thank you in advance.

Norman

gbutler

The short answer is the web interface. The graph I provided above is from APM monitor. Orion graphs allow you to specify the time and interval. ONce you do this and hit refresh... you will see that your URL will now contain necessary details to make the graph. This is what you cut and paste into the job scheduler. If you have netflow installed... I suspect that is where you would get your circuit info.

Here is a snippet of job scheduler with URLs..

2010-05-06_091210.jpg

byrona

Just a thought...

If you are trying to capture bandwidth usage for the sake of understanding when upgrades are necessary, the best place to get this information would be from your border router to your upstream provider. This would be a much simpler approach then trying to get this information from each individual system and then trying to show total bandwidth usage based on that.

Out of the box Orion should be able to get the type of bandwidth information your are looking for. To provide that in a report the best option would probably be to create a dashboard (custom view) with that information.

This thread explains how to create a custom dashboard with those different sources of data...

To go even a step further, once you have the dashboard created you can then use the report scheduler to send that on a regular basis to people via email.

Hope this helps.

nbjeter3

I thought of that, but we actually need it from the various nodes individually as well, so that we can update individual Circuits to remote sites, also it will help us determine if the remote routers are being overloaded or taxed near capacity so that we can determine upgrades for those as well. That's where the cpu/memory utilization trend reports will come in handy.

byrona

I guess I don't completely understand how you are trying to present this bandwidth/cpu/memory usage. It sounds like you have a geographically distributed network with a least one circuit to each site and that you are trying to understand your bandwidth usage for the circuit at each of those sites? Also it sounds like you may have a central location with a larger circuit to an upstream provider?

If you could try and explain your network design and how exactly you were hoping to present this data I might be able to help more.

KwameB

Thanks for this gbutler, simply solutions are always the best. The only drawback is getting more than 1 graph to be sent.