Generating automatic reporting

The reporting in NetX is available in two ways: by on-line log-in through the portal or by generating hardcopy reports (also available in word).

The simplest way to get quick access to the various reports, is by using the portal. The flexible reporting function offers a CIO, service and contract managers the ability to obtain daily or periodic reports on business service level including, for example, monthly trend analysis of application usage.

• Scorecard: Implements the base histograms used for the network score card: efficiency, capacity, and round-trip time.
• Capacity Analyzer: Implements the first capacity analyzer. For a given site and a percentage, it returns the number of minutes (inbound/outbound) that exceed the capacity limit parameter per day.
• Application Round Trip Times: Analyzes the round-trip time for a given application (parameter) and sorts them from high to low. This offers a fast way to detect latency issues for an application.
• Traffic Shaping: Analyzes the Site/Application combinations where the average bps is within 90 percent of the peak bps for a minute. This typically indicates that the traffic is throttled, for example by shaping. The top 20 combinations for the given period are presented.
• Cost Calculator: Based on the price per month per site for Inbound and Outbound, the volume of traffic that an application uses is used to compute a total cost of each application. Since link speed prices can differ significantly per region, this gives a better indication of the real costs that applications impose on the infrastructure. This is also an example of an Excel sheet that uses VBA code to adapt the output when the result Excel workbook is opened by the user.
• Critical Application Traffic: Computes the percentage of traffic per site that is used for the business critical applications.
• Efficiency Analyzer: For a given site and a percentage, it returns the number of minutes (inbound/outbound) that have a lower efficiency than the boundary value per day.

There are several types of reports available, ranging from SLA overview, to trend analysis and from application response times to bandwidth usage. Because NetX uses a role-based access system, information can be made available on a per-user basis.

Also included is a report generator that is capable of generating hardcopy reports of all the information that is available in NetX. The report generator allows the users to create custom reports based on information, time periods, information types, etc. It is also possible to enter additional information (e.g. explanations of certain graphs) after the reports have been generated.