What interactive reports and analyses should you be producing?

So what interactive reports and analyses should you be producing?

Reporting considerations 

- What information is really useful?

- What data is needed and are the metrics available?

- How to present/use the reports?

Analysis by service, workload, server, resource

Summaries and exception reports (all to defined standards)

Comparison of actual and target

- setting targets

- workload volume, resource consumption, trends

- service level achievement, costs, BPI

Ideally (or maybe not) complete coverage:

- all platforms, resources, workloads, services, costs

Resource accounting

- be able to say who is using what and how efficiently

Identification of areas needing attention

- focussing attention to where it is needed, bottlenecks, leaks, loops

- trends, alerts, exception management

Providing reassurance that all targets are being met

- Not just tons of data and loads of graphs.

The monitoring and analysis report shown here is typical of the sorts of report that a performance and capacity team will look at for a large number of services and servers. Ideally many of the reports will be automated to reflect unusual correlations or excessively busy users (and ideally unusual patterns such as ramps reflecting memory leaks or program loops).

There is an inclination to use excessive bar charts and other basic standard Excel-like plots in reports, which is understandable given the need to automate. However, it is worth considering past experience to try to highlight information as appropriate.

 Tufte has coined the word ‘sparkline’ to reflect the use of simplified graphics within text to highlight key patterns and some apply this to web-based performance reporting. Some exploit ‘hotspot’ to describe performance charts using medical-style color 2D surface-contours. Some use traffic lights or thumbnails to highlight server nodes with issues.

 We’ll look at automated reports next....

Adam Grummitt

Distinguished Engineer and Author ‘Capacity Management – A Practitioner Guide’

http://www.itgovernance.co.uk/products/3077

A selection of more white papers are available for free download http://www.metron-athene.com/_downloads/index.html