Generating Reports and Archiving Data

 Note   Report generation and archiving functionality is not provided by Microsoft Application Center 2000 (Application Center).

Reports

You can use the data logged by Application Center to produce many different types of reports. You can use these reports to collect and filter data for a variety of information.

• Usage analysis—this report type is concerned with how many requests were made, the average requests per second, the percentage of requests serviced in a given time frame (usually 5 seconds), the average number of queued requests, and the number of requests not serviced (for example, due to connections closed by the member). This information can provide an overview of the request load and your cluster's ability to service the request load. This report might also include the number of bytes downloaded per minute and the total number of bytes downloaded to date.

• Computer performance analysis—this report type is concerned with the average free RAM available, the average percent of CPU use, the total time spent at greater than 90 percent and less than 50 percent CPU utilization (or a similar breakdown), the average amount of free disk space, plus some of the usage information mentioned earlier. This information can provide an overview of the performance of your members and their ability to manage the load presented to them.

• Application performance analysis—this report type is concerned with the average free RAM available, the average percent of CPU use, the average number of queued requests, the number of requests not serviced (for example, due to connections closed by the member), and the total number of connection time-outs for a given time period. This information can provide an overview of your applications' ability to process requests and formulate and present data to the user, or to alter database sources in response to the requests. This report might also include total blocking locks used by the system. This will show if there is a problem in the database is used by an application.

• Network performance analysis—this report type is concerned with bytes sent over a time period (usually 1 minute), total current connections, and the total number of user connections. This information can provide an overview of your network's ability to service connections.

• Capacity planning—this report type is concerned with determining whether you have sufficient hardware and bandwidth to handle an upcoming usage spike or an extension of service or content. It can include data from usage analysis, computer and application performance analysis, and the results from your purchase planning. This information can provide an overview of you system's ability to handle upcoming events or service extensions as well as hardware or application changes you might need to make.

• Purchase planning—this report type is concerned with analyzing your system to determine whether to purchase more servers, RAM, or drive space. It can include data from your usage analysis and the computer performance analysis. This information can provide an overview of your projected purchasing requirements.

• Troubleshooting—this report type is concerned with event data, especially Warning and Error events. The data can be ordered by event source, event severity, date, time, or any other event parameter. This information can provide an overview of what is going on with a member or cluster over a longer time period and give you the flexibility of investigating events by many different parameters. This report is very similar to the Events view in the Application Center snap-in, except you can look at extended time frames in greater detail.

Archiving Data

For various reasons, such as to capture event and monitoring data before data summarization, to create custom data sets, to generate reports, or for long-range, detailed analysis, you might want to periodically archive monitoring data. You can create scripts, applications, and stored procedures to archive data that is stored in database tables or export the data to other applications.

Application Center is built with monitoring features that are useful for most monitoring tasks, but you might have special tasks to perform. Archiving data in custom-built tables is one method for simplifying these tasks. Although reporting features are not directly available in Application Center, you can use custom archiving to maintain tables for generating reports.

 Note   While you are archiving data, Application Center might not be able to log to the table that you are archiving to.

Related Topics

• For more information about archiving data, see Archive Log Data.

• For more information about ASP applications, see the IIS Help.

• For more information about events, see Events.

• For more information about data logging and summarization, see Monitoring Process.

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