Network trend reporting helps you establish an overall picture of the network usage and health of your organization. You can use reports to troubleshoot congestion, monitor usage, and plan for future capacity requirements. Using the TrafficDirector Report Editor and Trend Reporter applications, you can define and generate custom reports that let you:
- Identify usage patterns--Segment and Multi-Segment summaries, Usage reports, and Host and Conversation reports help you get a clear idea of the percentage and nature of network utilization.
- Gauge network health--Network availability reports, WAN usage, Router Backbone Usage, and Network Response Time reports are just a few of the reports you can use to diagnose the status and typical activity of your network.
- Count the cost--With Billing reports, you can see just how much your organization is spending with a host-by-host breakdown of cost per kilobyte.
These and other predefined report types available in TrafficDirector help you get the information you need to diagnose problems, evaluate current bandwidth requirements, plan for future expansion, and monitor compliance with network usage standards.
This chapter describes the report templates available in the TrafficDirector Report Editor application. Report templates determine what kind information is presented in a report (such as Host Conversation statistics), and how that information is organized and displayed (by packets, utilization or errors). You also use Report Editor to define report format, graph type, and sorting statistics for Host and Conversation related reports.
When you run reports for a selected agent, agent group, switch, or Frame Relay agent, you need to specify additional parameters called Report Details.
Report Details include the period of time you want the report to reflect (start and end time), the kind of information that you want to view (detail data or daily data), and the report output (screen display, file, e-mail, or printout). Trend Reporter uses the variables in the template file for the report type you select along with Report Details information to generate reports.
Before you can use Trend Reporter to generate reports, several agent and server configuration tasks must be completed to ensure that the data you want is logged and stored to an SQL database that Trend Reporter can access and read. You will find more information about agent and SQL server configuration tasks in Chapter 6, "Working With Agents."
Report templates are report configuration files that contain parameters that define the information included in a report, and how that information is presented. TrafficDirector includes several pre-defined report templates. Use the Report Editor application to create new report templates that contain display, sort, or other parameters specific to your monitoring needs. The following lists report types and the information they provide.
Segment summary
| Three graphs showing packet type, packet size, and errors for total utilization for a segment.
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| Segment history
| Historical view of packet type and utilization, packet size, and errors for a segment.
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| Multi-segment summary
| Individual statistics for one or more segments of the same topology.
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Multi-segment
history
| Historical view of individual statistics for one or more segments of the same topology.
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| Multi-segment history mix
| Historical view of individual statistics for one or more segments of mixed topologies.
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| Protocol usage
| Historical view of packets or utilization for one or more protocols or applications running on a segment.
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| Protocol distribution
| Packet, octet, and utilization statistics on the protocols defined in a hierarchical protocol tree.
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| Conversation summary
| Packet or utilization statistics for the conversations on a segment.
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| Conversation history
| Historical view of packet or utilization statistics for the conversations on a segment.
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| Host summary
| Packet or utilization statistics for the hosts or departments on a segment.
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| Host history
| Historical view of packet or utilization statistics for the hosts or departments on a segment.
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| Host outbound
| Detailed packet and utilization statistics on outbound traffic of hosts or departments on a segment.
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| Host verbose
| Detailed packet, error, and utilization statistics on hosts or departments on a segment.
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| DLCI usage
| Packet or utilization statistics for the DLCIs1 on a Frame Relay link.
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| WAN usage
| Packet or utilization statistics in both directions over the WAN link. DLCIs are shown individually for a Frame Relay link.
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| VLAN usage
| Packet or utilization statistics for VLAN2 ports on two switches connected by a Fast Ethernet link.
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| Router backbone usage
| Packet and utilization statistics for all interfaces of a router. For use with the NetFlow option.
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| Billing
| Amount and cost of outgoing traffic for each department, host, or both, on a segment.
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| FR network availability summary
| Percentage of Frame Relay link down time.
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| FR network availability history
| Historical view of the percentage of Frame Relay link down time.
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| Round trip delay history
| Historical view of the response time of one or more nodes on a segment.
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- 1DLCIs = Data-Link Connection Identifier.
- 2VLAN = Virtual Local Area Network.
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Certain report types, like certain TrafficDirector real-time monitoring applications, are valid only for particular agent and domain combinations. Some reports reflect statistics for only a single agent, switch port, or DLCI, while others show statistics for multiple segments--you can specify multiple agents for these reports. Still other reports show statistics logged against a number of generic domains or protocol domains. Table 42-1 shows the valid agent and domain combinations you can specify for each report type available in Trend Reporter.
Table 42-1: Agent and Domain Combinations for Trend Reporter
| Report Template
| Maximum Number of Agents
| Maximum Number of Domains
|
|---|
Segment summary or history
| 1
| One generic domain only
|
Multi-segment summary/
history
| 20
| One generic domain only
|
| Multi-Segment history mix
| 20
| One protocol or RMON1 domain only
|
| Protocol usage
| 1
| Up to 20 protocol domains
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| Protocol distribution
| 1
| References domains defined in the domtree.inf file
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| Conversation history or summary
| 1
| One domain, either protocol or generic
|
| Host summary, host history, host outbound, or host verbose
| 1
| One domain, either protocol or generic
|
| DLCI usage
| 1
| One domain, either protocol or generic
|
| WAN usage
| 10
| One protocol domain or RMON domain only
|
| VLAN ssage
| 1
| One domain, either protocol or generic
|
| Router backbone usage
| 1
| One generic domain
|
| Billing
| 1
| One domain, either protocol or generic
|
| FR network availability History/Summary
| 20
| One generic domain only
|
Round trip delay
history
| 1
| RMON domain only
|
- 1Remote Monitoring.
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An exception report shows you, for a selected statistic, only the instances above or below a value you specify. You can use exception reports to determine any thresholds that you may want to set and monitor. For example, you might want to view utilization only when it exceeds or falls below a certain percentage.
If a segment shows utilization consistently greater than 85 percent, you may want to take a closer look at the source, shift traffic to another resource, and set utilization traps on that particular segment. You can run exception reports using the multi-segment history report template.
You generate exception reports using Trend Reporter just like any other report--the difference is you need to define a report template that contains the exception variables that you want to use. See "Choosing Predefined Report Templates" in Chapter 36, "Generating Reports."
