Perry and I are working on two different templates.  Both templates will work with Perceive and Analyzer out-of-the-box.

(1) a general set of views for a group, with detailed charts per servers.
(2) a short version of the application report.

Template (1) Contains a calendar overview of the analysis period depicting CPU utilization; application level charts with CPU, Memory, Network, and IO rates; and server specific views with CPU, Memory, IO rate, and Network.

Template (2) Contains a Analyzer generated paragraph reviewing the analysis period; a CPU contention rule; two memory contention rules; collection status; the group's busiest busines hour; the group's busiest batch period; server CPU usage; and server memory usage.

It would be helpful to know what you had in mind. Have you given thought to who your audience is, and what they would like to get out of the report?

With your input, we should have something ready in the next couple of days.

I like the report a lot, Karl. At this point, I believe that my management would appreciate such a report immensely. They typically find it hard to articulate what they want ahead of time, but will let me know if they like and find useful what I provide to them. This report would be an improvement over what I have been doing.

Can the date format in the report be easily changed? I notice there are three different ones in use: YYYY_MM, YYYY_MM_DD, and Mmm DD YYYY. I prefer the last one.

I assume that separate reports could be tailored for distinct groups of servers and/or applications. Are these specified by Perceive groups or some other way?

Perry and I have created two new views, attached.  The first is an "Application Report", a stripped down version my original report.  The second is a set of standard charts that reviews the group as a whole, and each individual server.  Both views work with Perceive out of the box, no need to create additional extensions.  You will need a recent build, 0.8.0 or above.  See Perry for more version details.

To install, copy the html and xml files into your ~/analyzer/WEB-INF directory. Edit the application.properties file and add monthly.xml to the end of the comma-separated list called views.filelist. You must restart for Analyzer to recognize the new monthly.xml file. After it reads the file in the first time, subsequent edits do not require a restart, just a refresh by clicking the word “Views” in the Analyzer browser window.

The “Application Report” requires two interval selections. The “Interval@Rules:” interval is applied to the rules section of the report, and allows for multi-month history. The other interval is used as the main analysis period of the report. I would suggest adding two new named intervals to Perceive: Last Month and Last 3 Months. They make interval selection much easier.

I share your concern with the date formatting. Unfortunately, it will require a significant investment in development time to provide date formatting across all functions and instances. Perry – please chime in where I am wrong. There are several places that we just can't get a different format yet. I have listed some of them below.

1) Date-split "months" changes the date to 2006_04.
2) $start.getShort() produces 01-Apr-06.
3) $now.getDate() produces Tue May 09 16:33:45 CDT 2006
4) Date-split "days" changes the data to 2006_04_02.
5) X-axis in charts use 22-Apr.

What I have done is everywhere possible, used the “DD MMM yy” format. A majority of the output now matches the same general format.

As far as tailoring a report to each application, what we are providing is a template that is executed against a Perceive group name. At my firm, we use the same set of rules across all applications/groups. This definitely requires a least-common-denominator approach, but is still valid. We use the report as a monthly proactive analysis of our key applications. This is a Red-Yellow-Green light type of capacity analysis. From the data provided in the report, we determine if the application requires an in-depth analysis, or not. The analyst reviews the document, supplements with other data if necessary, gives the application a R/Y/G light, and summarizes his/her opinion of the application and if further investigation is warranted. Action items are created and tracked separately. The report has been very well received from management, business customers, and other IT groups. It is a huge step forward at my firm.

If there is interest, I would be happy to continue to discuss how we are using our report, what we are accomplishing, and what we want to add.  Which will require a much longer post.