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18. Running Reports against Groups Logo




Selecting a specific Group and running Reports Top


Go to the Network Level area on the main CROME screen.  Select the “Local Group” and open up the folder where you saved your new group.

              

You are now ready to use (i.e. select) this group or any other group at the same Network Level and run a report against it. Select the desired group, and highlight the item and hit the “Run Report”.

At this point you have successfully created a custom Group and running a report against the Group in the CROME reporting system.



Selecting a set of Groups and running Reports Top


This is identical to “Selecting and running a specific Group” with the exception that you select a folder underneath a physical layer in either the “System Groups” or the “Local Groups” area.

 Go to the Network Level area on the main CROME screen.  Select a folder where several groups (or even several directories containing groups) are saved.

               

The above example contains 63 group items under nine sub folders (each folder containing 7 items).

You are now ready to use (i.e. select) this group or any other group at the same Network Level.  You are now able to run a report against the group by selecting the desired group, highlighting the item, and hitting the “Run Report” button.

At this point you have successfully created a report definition which combines more than one defined Group item.  The report was run against the set of all Groups under the selected folder in the CROME reporting system.  In most cases the output is in the standard CROME display/output formats.  However, note when running a report, if you select the “View By Group" as shown below, this selection will only work for groups or group sets.

After generating the report, the resulting CROME output is modified to display the group hierarchy of your group selection be it a single Group item or a hierarchical set of Group items as in the group folder example above.  The upper left portion (the first 19 rows of a 73 row report) of a typical “View By Group” output is shown below:

The first cross-reference column “Level” specifies the level (from the selected folder).

The second cross-reference column “Group” specifies the actual grouping either the name of a folder or the name of an item). 

The third cross-reference column “Result Set” or “Raw Data Set” specifies the unique path to a folder or a Group item. This (third and last) column is needed to make sense of the report if any Thresholds, Limits, or Sorts are applied to the report.  Note if “Show all Cross Reference Data” is not checked in your Graph Properties (See “Graph Properties”) only the first two columns will not be shown.

Under no circumstances are Summary statistics presented in a “View By Group” report. Reason being the report either contains one item or a mixture of items at different roll-up levels.

Duplicate group items are automatically filtered from upper level roll-ups (i.e. folders) in the hierarchical report.  For example, if the report row LDM/2dmsc1/BSC contains the same item as report row LDM/2dmsc1/MSC then both the “rollups” LDM/2dmsc1 and LDM will not count the item twice.



Groups and Naming Conventions Top


The importance of good naming standards can provide a great positive impact to the CROME reporting system.   After reading the last section it should be apparent that a well thought out naming standard can be used to easily and more importantly automatically cluster network elements together to provide easy reporting in the following domains:

Geographic Groupings

Route Groupings (i.e. Trunk connectivity between major and/or minor subsystems)

Combining Cell Splits

Combining Migrations of Sites across major network elements

Of course there are other possibilities, however the point here is that CROME is designed to leverage off of intelligently laid out standards and avoid mundane repetitive adjustments to the critical groups, trunks and clusters that are used to run your business.

In the example shown  in  “Selecting a set of Groups and running Reports” that a route based hierarchy of trunk groups was created for eight Nortel MSCs.  The use of Regular Expressions in the group editor eliminates any requirement of updating or adding new trunks to specific groups.   So in this case the customer has fully automated the clustering of data for all time through a smart naming convention.



Running Groups at Lower Levels Top


Since a CROME Group defines a set of Network Elements at a given level, it by definition also defines a set of Network Elements at all lower levels in the hierarchy.  For example, if a Group defines 5 EBTSs, it also de facto defines all of their Sectors in the same Group.

For this reason, whenever you select a Group to run a report, a pull-down menu choice appears that allows you to run this same report any a level lower than the level of the group.  So, if you have a Group of EBTSs, and you want to look at Sector statistics on that Group, you simply select the group, choose “Run Report at Level: SECT”, and click Run Report.

This feature prevents users from creating identical groups at different levels in the hierarchy.  I.e., if you define a group at a certain level, you shouldn’t have to define it again for the same sub-elements at a lower level.

Note that even though there is a pull-down choice to run the report at a lower level, the report itself must still be valid at that level.  E.g., if the report you are running is not allowed to be run at the SECT level (say, for instance, because it contains tables that are only valid at the EBTS level and above), then you will see an error when you try to run the report.



Geographic Polygon Group Reporting Top


Normally, View By Group reports do not allow the “Geo Reporting” feature, because there is not single geographic representation of a Group.  However, if the Group(s) in a report are defined by polygons (see Geographic Grouping by Drawing Polygons section above), then the output can be represented in a Geo Report based upon the polygons.

So, for example, if a report is run View By Group on a folder which contains a set of polygon-based groups, the “Tools / Geo Map” feature on the report would launch a Geo Map that could look something like the picture below.  Note that the normal Geo Report slider-bar works, except instead of changing the colors of sites the slider-bar changes the colors of the polygons.


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Copyright © 1997-2005 Quantum Systems Integrators Last modified: 30 Jun 2005 00:19
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