QUESTION:
How do I create my own custom reports?
SOLUTION:
'Advanced reports' are a set of pre-defined reports that allows customers to view and analyze different "types" of performance data for a user-specified set of devices or containers and some additional context, depending on the report itself. As these are pre-defined reports, there is very little scope for the user to specify parameters for the report, other than stating the duration of the report and for what devices/containers the report is run against.
'Custom reports' meanwhile, allows for greater customization than 'Advanced Reports', as the user has the ability to define far more parameters before running the report. These options can range from exporting to CSV (depending on the type of the report) to defining what severity's should be ignored by the report etc.
Sometimes though, neither the Advanced or Custom Reports are sufficient for a customers reporting needs. Adhoc reports allow you to create your own reports by allowing you to import specific graphs and tables from other Advanced and Custom reports.
Creating an Adhoc Report:
If you are looking to create a custom report for the historical data of a particular test(s), and are having difficulty finding the equivalent data in a pre-existing report, a great starting point is: Reports >> Custom >> Historical Performance. Exporting in CSV format as described below, will give you all the test results for every polling interval for the specified time range.
To import tables and graphs into an Adhoc report, simply run one of the Advanced/Custom reports and you will see that each element of report has a Gold star above it. Clicking on the star will allow you to either create a new Adhoc report, with that element included or to add the reporting element to an already existing Adhoc report.
Keep adding any metrics from various reports in the same manner until you are happy that you have all the reporting elements added to your Adhoc report. You can now navigate to 'Reports >> My Reports' and edit the order of the elements as you see fit.
You can then change the order of the reports using the arrow buttons at the top right of the reporting element. Remember to save when complete.
Exporting the Report to CSV:
By default, most reports can only be exported in PDF format (top left. There are several exceptions to this rule (i.e. Custom >> Threshold Violation event report) depending on the content of the report.
If you see the magnifying icon above any reporting element, then it means it can be directly exported to CSV as well as allowing you to convert to Tabular format etc.
