How To Use Time Filters In SolarWinds Reports

Reporting on the availability, performance and capacity of your network is just as important as the metrics displayed on a live dashboard. Reports enables you to share the network status, and health, with the right people in your organization, to collaborate on taking actions.

Any good reporting engine should easily facilitate reports that cover a defined time period. One very useful scenario is reporting on the network’s behaviour during business hours and out of hours. Such a report helps you to spot abnormal metrics, or growth, based on the expected IT activity for that period.

SolarWinds® Orion platform provides the capability to display data based on a defined day/time range. You can define such a range using;

• Filters based on weekdays (i.e. Sunday, Monday…) and time
• A certain date/time (i.e. 15/03/2019 07:00 – 10:00)

Network Latency Nightly Report

One example is reporting on the latency (response time) of critical devices, in a remote data centre, that are part of a nightly batch job. We want to see how the network behaves during certain times of the day and week and not have historic data for periods of time outside of this clouding our visibility.

Start by creating a new report and make sure to select the below filters in the Add Content page.

Note in the above image, I have taken an approach of creating a negative filter, where it is quicker and more efficient to utilise a NOT filter. Include necessary columns to display in the report which must include at least Node Name, IP Address, and the metric we need to report on, Average response time. I also recommend you think about using custom properties for additional filtering and grouping, for example just production servers in primary DC.

Once done, it should look something like this, and note how the use of the Sort Results means that I am putting devices that are worthy of review at the top of the list for my ease.

Weekend WAN Utilization

Another example is internet link utilization at night when you’re transferring your backups to the cloud. Such a report will provide actionable insight, from the network perspective, into your backup strategy. This brings focus to the report output either showing the behaviour you are actually interested in, or excluding data which is not desired in the output.

Make sure to select the relevant interfaces in Add Content.

In this scenario, we opted to for a dynamic filter and utilised pre-populated custom properties that enabled us to instantly determine devices and interfaces we wanted to report on.

Include necessary columns to display in the report which must include at least Interface Name and Transmit Percent Utilization.

Note: The data aggregation for Transmit Percent Utilization is set to Max to reflect the highest bandwidth consumption on the link and the Custom Format is stating I want to see only positive numbers, up to 2 decimal places and with a % sign on the end.

Once done, it should look something like this.

Us humans (especially managers) however like and work better with visual presentations, so let’s enrich the report by adding a chart displaying bytes transferred during the backup job.

That’s it, I hope I have inspired you to think about your own reporting and how focusing on specific time periods will give you visibility of things you may not currently be aware of. You can download one of the sample reports for Node Availability mentioned above. Remember to adjust the filters and time inclusion to what works for you.