In this section we will discuss running System Reports.  System Reports are the defined “Official” reports that reside on the Corporate CROME Server, and will be available to all authorized users from their desktop PCs or workstations. We will review the “Main Screen” and them perform several exercises in running reports, building up from simple reporting results to more complex results.

• What is a Report
  
• What is a Report Item
  

A Report is a generic definition (constructed by your CROME reseller, your CROME administrator, or by you yourself) that can be applied to any legal combination of criteria as specified in the CROME main screen to generate a Report Item.  The important point: the same report definition can be used to generate many, many types of results, for example monthly reports across a year at a high level presentation, all the way down to individual items at a specific hour at any sub-level. 

One “generic” CROME report definition can replace 10-30 traditional reports as it can be applied to many different physical views and time ranges/rollups.  This flexibility is accomplished via the application of your preferences in the "Main Screen".  A complete set of preferences (i.e. filling in or accepting the default options of the "Main Screen") is called a "report filter".

A Report Item is a combination of data that is presented to the user in a new frame or window when the user runs a Report with a specific set of criteria.

The Report Item which provides multiple views to the information mined from the CROME data-store (or distributed CROME data-store).  A report is composed of the following sections:

Status                    A listing of information and data messages as the report was built.

Graph                     A graphical representation of your Result Set data with a “live mouse-over” display.

Result Set             The text grid (i.e. spreadsheet representation of the Graph).

Raw Data               The text grid (i.e. spreadsheet) of the raw low-level data that was used to generate both the Result Set and the Graph by the application of formulas as shown in Formulas.

Formulas               The formulas required to satisfy this report (as entered in the formula editor).  The values of the raw pegs (viewable on the Raw Data screen) are pumped through the formulas to come up with the Result Set (and Graph).

Formulas (flat)     This is the same as the “Formulas” display, except in the case where formulas contain other formulas.  CROME formulas can be defined based upon raw database pegs or on other formulas.  The “Formulas” display will simply show the names of embedded formulas, whereas the “Formulas (flat)” display will expand all sub-formulas to show every equation in the report.

Schema Info          Information on the consistency of data across all major system instances.  CROME has the ability to report across non-homogenious systems.  For example if your company has different GSM revisions of MSCs in operation, the data tables and data fields may be different amongst the different MSCs.  CROME consolidates all similar tables and fields and notes the differences in this “Schema Info” display on the Report Item.

Cum. % Graph    A special graphical representation of your Result Set data with that shows a unique cumulative viewpoint i.e. the percentage of items under a given formula value.  This graph can provide a bird's eye view of the varience distribution for any formula in your data.

Migration              Optional information on the movement of network elements across time.

Once any "Report" is run and a "Report Item" is generated the user can switch between the major sections of a report item via the “View” drop down menu on any "Report item".