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.

NextReports: Pivot Widget

NextReports Server allows users to add a pivot widget inside a dashboard. This pivot can be created from any report found on server. Pivot widget is based on a simple sql query without OLAP integration.

User selects what he wants to see on ROW, COLUMN and DATA. Also two check boxes will make the totals for rows and columns visible or not.

When user clicks compute, data is presented to user. Also, on compute action, user selection is saved and when user returns to the widget, this selection is made automatically.

Being a widget, user can also detach a pivot and make it as big as the screen with F11 key to have more space if needed.

Alongside drill-down, pivot widget brings a new BI feature  to analyze data.

Because we want to contribute to java open source, our wicket pivot  project was put on github.

Do you have something to say about our pivot? Please tell us more on our forum.