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Stephen_Boylett's avatar
Stephen_Boylett
9 months ago

Compare activity from two separate days

Can we have functionality to compare current/recent performance against a “baseline” period? 

I really need to compare CPU ready over from around 100 hosts, before and after a change was made to reduce it. Comparing stats over a month is a waste of time as the spikes are averaged, looking at alert data is a chore as it needs to take account of the number alerts and the amount of time the alerts condition exists (and even that is misleading). The only way I can think of to properly compare the stats is to select a period to use as a baseline to compare the current stats with. 

As it stands that requires exporting performance stats to Excel (nightmare) and graphing from there (even worse). I might be able to find a way using the api but this feels like it should be baked in functionality.

More than happy to take other suggestions but I am pretty sure this is the only way to go.

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  • Stuart_Weenig's avatar
    Stuart_Weenig
    Icon for Legend rankLegend
    9 months ago

    You can get close to this in two ways:

    1. You can build a dashboard that has the same widget with two different default timeframes (previous 24 hours is not an available preset though, sadly, but you could pick last 24 hours for one and last 48 hours for another). This is a pretty permanent/static way of doing it.
    2. For a more dynamic option, hit the drop down on any line graph on a dashboard or on the resources page and select “Anomaly Detection”. Within this view, you have the option of showing “24 Hours Offset” which would plot the data you’re looking at, but the start and end time have 24 hours subtracted from them. So if you were looking at last 24 hours originally, this would give you the previous day’s trend. You also have 1 week offset and 1 month offset. Remember, this just subtracts a certain amount from the current start/end times you’re looking at. Also remember to choose the specific datapoint in that graph.

    Neither of these really get exactly what you’re looking for, but they are the options that LM will respond back with asking if you’ve already checked them out. 

  • Stephen_Boylett's avatar
    Stephen_Boylett
    9 months ago

    Thanks for responding but (as I think you guessed) neither option is going to work for me.

    I need the time frame to be split a couple of weeks to be of use. Most of our changes happen over the weekend so going back 24 hours is of no value. Ideally, I would want to compare known busy periods. So it really needs to be an arbitrary date versus another arbitrary date.

    Dashboards aren’t really an option, because of the number of hosts involved. I’ve tried mucking about selecting individual hosts, with the selection option on the graphs, but I tend to get lost after the first 20 or so (can they be ordered?).

    Reports don’t work because the number of graphs is limited and trying to view this amount of data on a single graph is pointless.

  • Stuart_Weenig's avatar
    Stuart_Weenig
    Icon for Legend rankLegend
    9 months ago

    Yep, I knew they wouldn’t hit the mark, but had to try. Definitely need to have the ability to specify a start_time (and/or end_time) minus X where X is is a number of days (float) or minutes or something.

    Have you tried the dynamic dashboard filter widget? It’s not OOTB, but pretty easy to implement. Would let you filter an entire dashboard by group, resource, or instance.

    Dashboards UIv4 is in open beta now i think? Maybe reach out to your CSM to get that turned on to see if it can do any of this.