When will graphs be part of report writer?

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

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

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

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

 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.
 

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

 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.

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