Thursday, September 27, 2012

Analyzing NextReports downloads with NextReports

Because NextReports is a reporting tool, it can be used to make analysis even on itself. We use NextReports to analyze the download process of its artifacts: engine, designer, server and update (designer download started from application update).

To make this analysis possible a simple pivot is used. This pivot can show things like:
  • location from where the download was started through fields like country, city, ip.
  • artifact that was downloaded through fields like product, file, version
  • time when the download  was done through a date field

A simple selection that shows the number of downloads for every artifact is like this:


Report used by pivot also has parameters which allows to filter data. For example it is easy to select a period of time between to dates, country, product, version:



Results will show more than simple statistics. It is easy to spot attacks of Denial Of Service type if a large number of downloads is seen from the same ip:


Also it is possible to know how many downloads are done in a period of time, seeing totals for product or for artifact:


This is just an example when NextReports pivot can be really useful to make analysis and get a lot of answers from raw data.

No comments: