Design – Build – Run: Applied Practices and Principles for Production-Ready Software Development

Chapter 9. Reporting and Analytics

There's often a tendency to think of reporting and analytics as simply providing business users and stakeholders with data gathered from around the system, typically from within the database — for example, a report showing sales figures for a particular period or region. Reporting and analytics are sometimes referred to as business intelligence. However, reports are not just developed for business users; they can be developed for technical staff as well. As you've already seen, monitoring solutions can capture potentially thousands of events and performance data, all of which can be packaged into very useful reports. For example, a report could show the number of alerts, grouped by type, that were raised on a specific day. A report such as this might be used to better configure the monitoring rules to remove unnecessary noise. Another report might show end-to-end transaction and throughput figures. A report such as this would be useful to both business and technical staff. Good reports can provide the necessary information to make business decisions as well as technical decisions.

This chapter is organized into the following sections:

• Reporting Overview — Provides an overview of the reporting function and the categories of reports, as well as some specifics on capturing report criteria and requirements. It also shows some typical reports and output styles. The key elements to any report include:

  • The selection criteria

  • The output results

  Reports ...