Is Health Report really that?

[Brian Bergin]

The "Health Report" isn't really a health report, it's more of a Status Report isn't it? Also, seems like the Maintenance Report and the existing Health Report should be combined into one "Status Report.  In all actuality, they all belong in the same report since EoX would fall under status too.  Clean up the columns, too much wasted white space, and let us move columns around and select which columns we want to see and you could do this just as easily in a single place.  Just my 2¢...

[David Harper]

The terminology and the reports are the same as in the currently shipping FindIT 2.0.  Not that this invalidates the feedback at all.

The Health report is intended to summarise the maintenance and EoX reports and also take into account the availability of any firmware updates.  In future, we can also add field notices and other information as well.  In any case, the point is that it is a summary, while the other reports provide all the gory details for that area - all the different end of life milestones for example.

I'm not sure how we could get all of this data into a single report without it becoming unwieldy, even with the ability to customise the display.  The excess whitespace is likely because the table expands to fit the available real estate.  If you shrink the width of the browser, you will see that go away.  However, if we assumed a wide display and added more columns, then the table would likely overflow the edge of the screen when looked at on a laptop.

In any case, it's certainly something we can look at more.  I don't consider the reporting functionality 'finished' by any means.

Cheers,
Dave.

[Brian Bergin]

I just looked, there's no Health Report.  There is a Network Health Check, but I honestly hand't paid that close of attention to that.  I still think the name should be more like Summary since that's its intention.  

[David Harper]

True - the names are a bit inconsistent.

You might be right - we could be clearer here.  We'll talk it over and see if we can get a consensus.

Cheers,
Dave.

[David Trad]

Hi Dave,

I thought long and hard about this one and must say I kind of agree with Brian on this one :-/

I would like one singular name (Maybe Device Reporting) when you click on that you then get the sub navigation menu where you have have a "Status Report" tab and then a "Health Status" tab and then any other tab that may be required moving forward.

I think there is far too much on the left hand navigation menu that could be moved to a sub navigation menu that resides at the top of that page (Or frame if you want to call it that).

It makes sense to do major categories on the left and sub categories within the frame of the page.

These are cosmetic in every aspect, but yet can alter the entire user experience by simplifying navigation, one of my biggest pet hates is poorly designed interfaces (Not suggesting in any way that this one is poorly designed at all), FindIT could do with some small modifications to its flow.

Cheers,

David.

[David Harper]

There are some limitations in what we can do with the navigation as we need to be consistent across products.  Granted this is a new look-and-feel with FindIT, but you will see this styling and layout move across the portfolio over time.

We could make reporting much more customisable.  It won't happen for the initial release, but it's definitely something we could enhance.  We'd need to think very carefully about how we built it, and this is a good opportunity for you to speak up about how you would like to use reporting in the broader business workflow.

Couple of thoughts:

• Would you want something that you could essentially lift directly from the UI (or export) and incorporate into a larger quarterly or annual report to a customer say?
• If you were exporting for use elsewhere, what format would you want - a raw data format such as csv, or a formatted document format like pdf?
• What sorts of data would you like to be able to report on, and what would you want to see first?

Cheers,
Dave.

[Brian Bergin]

I like the ability to export.  CSV is fine.  It imports to Excel just fine and from there I can create a PDF easily enough, though I'm sure some would prefer to be able export a PDF.

As for what data, if we just had tick boxes to include or exclude data that would make it so each of us can customize the reports and Cisco doesn't get blamed for making a report that doesn't work for one person or another by making them all predefined.

[David Harper]

Any specific requests in terms of data you would like to be able to include in a report?  You know the sorts of information that the probe can get - what would your wishlist look like?

Cheers,
Dave.

[David Harper]

By the way, I noticed over the weekend that engineering have snuck in a small feature while I wasn't paying attention.  It seems that the columns displayed in the reports are now selectable, which allows you to focus on the content that you are particularly interested in.  I'm not sure when this change was made, but it does give you a little more flexibility.

Cheers,
Dave.

[David Harper]

You also notice that in beta 5, we changed the report name to 'Summary Report'.  Hopefully that will be a bit clearer.  At some point we will align the reports in the utility as well, so we are consistent across the board.  Not quite sure when that will happen though.

Cheers,
Dave.