Set Up Application Reporting

In addition to the normal IP traffic reports aggregated by client location, PerformanceGuard can also do trend aggregation of application-traffic data per computer per application at fixed time intervals.

You can access this information as a summary report in the PerformanceGuard web interface by selecting ANALYZE > Computers > Application Report.

In PerformanceGuard the term application doesn’t necessarily mean a single software program. Instead it means a collection of things that you find it meaningful to measure the performance of together.

Thus, a number of things must be in place for application reporting to work:

You must have defined at least one type of application, read more how to setup these applications in Network Applications.
You must enable trend aggregation (described in the following)

Optionally, you can also include data from Monitor Availability, Latency and Response Times with Application Ping (that is monitoring of availability, response times, etc.) and Web Applications (that is monitoring of web requests) in your application reporting.

Enable Trend Aggregation

Aggregation at computer level can’t be enabled from the PerformanceGuard web interface. Instead you must execute SQL against the PerformanceGuard backend database (by default named pguard), for example in Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio.

First decide how long you need to keep the aggregated data for. If you want to be able to run a weekly report, make sure to set a retention period somewhat longer than one week. The retention period is specified in hours. The default is 768 hours (32 days). You can also change the retention period on the Status tab of ADMINISTRATION > Setup > Parameters, where it’s called KEEP_PERIOD_DETAIL_TREND.

You also need to specify how often the trending should be done (per hour, day or week). The trend period or level is specified in minutes. The default is 60 minutes. If you want a period that’s shorter than one day (1440 minutes), make sure to specify a number that 1440 can be divided by, for example 60, 120, 360 or 720. If the period must be longer than one day, make sure to specify a multiple of 1440 minutes. If you set the period to 60 minutes, you’ll have an aggregated value per computer per application every hour of the day.

-- Set trend level in minutes (choose 60, 120, 180, 240, 360, 480, 720 or a multiple of 1440)
-- If set to 1440 minutes you will have one aggregated value for each computer per day.
UPDATE status SET value='1440' WHERE parameter='DETAIL_TREND_INTERVAL'

-- Set retention period for computer level trend data in hours
UPDATE status SET value='768' WHERE parameter='KEEP_PERIOD_DETAIL_TREND'

-- Enable computer level trending for IP-traffic
UPDATE status SET value='true' WHERE parameter='TRAFFIC_DETAIL_TREND_ENABLED'

-- Enable computer level trending for transaction filters
UPDATE status SET value='true' WHERE parameter='TRANSACTION_DETAIL_TREND_ENABLED'

View Application Report

When you have defined the application and enabled trend aggregation, you are ready to view application reports.

For information about how to generate an application report (ANALYZE > Computers > Application Report), see Application Report.