Reporting

BixData is a flexible platform for data gathering, manipulation and reporting. The advanced reporting includes graphing and html reporting capabilities. BixServer has many predefined reports and graphs that provide useful information about servers, applications and even hardware inventory. Reports can provide information on specific servers, services and also averages for groups of servers.

Automatic Configuration

All reports and graphs are automatically configured based on servers’ association with a Tag, Service Check or with a specific data collection. A report wizard automatically detects missing data collections and schedules new collections.

Compare, Baseline and Average Graphs

All graphing and table reports include the ability to average a set of servers. Any graph that is generated with BixServer can be viewed through static HTML reports with average graphs, or in BixDesktop in an interactive graph viewer, which allows you to compare a specific server’s performance or metrics to a baseline average of its peer servers.

HTML Reporting and Customization

BixServer can automatically export all report tables and graphs as HTML and .png images. HTML views are automatically generated with the ability to browse reports based on

• Time
• Server grouping by tags
• Report types

HTML reporting is useful to publish information to other groups in the organization. All HTML reports are customizable XML templates, and can be modified with a template editor or generated programmatically through scripts.

Report Scheduling

All report graphs and tables can be scheduled to run at a specific time or on a recurring interval.

Templates and Report Customization

Templates in XML are used to generate report tables and graphs. A template editor is included in BixDesktop to edit existing templates. Templates can even be programmatically created by scripts or translated from other reporting tools into XML.

Templates control many aspects of tables and graphs including:

• Operational or SQL data included in the report
• Averaging
• Appearance including fonts, colors, fill styles
• Data Pivoting and grouping

Data Pivoting and Grouping

Data in the Operational Data store is stored in multiple dimensions. This allows you to pivot and group data together. Examples of these features include the ability to graph all the performance of a specific type of hardware, such as all dual core CPUs or all West Coast web servers. These features are also very useful for grouping data based on outside parameters, such as customer accounts.

Other examples include grouping together and averaging the hard disk IO Load for all hard drives of a specific hardware vendor model.

XML Export

All report data for tables and graphs can be automatically exported into XML. BixData uses easy to understand data schemas to help integrate into other data stores.

Custom Reporting

Custom monitoring and service checks automatically create reports based on the configuration of the service check. This example, a simple script was added to return the Google page count for a phrase. BixServer reporting automatically created the graph setup.

Operational Data Store, Built in SQL Support

BixServer’s Operational Data Store allows the gathering and storage of more than 30GB per day. Through included data sources and plug-ins, BixAgent can collect data from any server on any platform and store directly into a number of supported SQL Servers. BixData uses an open specification for data storage. Open data exchange is very important to integrate with different environments and software systems, especially in IT. All data schemas and data storage in BixData is in XML format that can easily be integrated into 3rd party applications or accessed directly from the underlying SQL database servers.

SQL Support is included for MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server and Firebird.