ReportCenter Overview

ReportCenter is a software program that gives IT and network managers a detailed view of application performance and service levels across PacketShaper®, PacketShaper Xpress™, PacketSeeker®, or AppVantage® deployments. Within PacketGuide for ReportCenter all of these Packeteer hardware products are referred to collectively as PacketShapers for the sake of brevity.

ReportCenter collects, aggregates and stores network performance data, produces network summary reports and template reports, and allows you to perform custom queries.

With ReportCenter, you can establish performance goals for your network, and then compare the actual network performance to the established goals. Using collected data, you can see how your network is running now, understand how well it has performed in the past, and predict future performance.

ReportCenter collects performance data from the Packeteer devices in your network. These devices may be PacketShaper, PacketShaper Xpress, PacketSeeker, or AppVantage units - all of these products are referred to collectively as PacketShapers throughout PacketGuide for ReportCenter. Components are logical or virtual elements that appear on those devices - one component for the device (PacketShaper component), and one component for each traffic class on the device (Traffic Class component). 

If Host Accounting is enabled in a PacketShaper and ReportCenter, Host components are also detailed. If Flow Detail Records are configured in your PacketShapers and ReportCenter, FDR data is sent to ReportCenter by your PacketShapers independently of the Measurement Engine data that is gathered by the Collection Agent process.

Central or Distributed Installation

ReportCenter's architecture is designed to easily support distributed installations. The ReportCenter Server and Collection Agent may both be installed on a single computer, or they may be installed on separate computers over a network.

For some networks a single ReportCenter system (ReportCenter Server and Collection Agent) installed on the same computer will be appropriate. For other networks multiple Collection Agents forwarding data to a single ReportCenter Server may be the best solution. To achieve the greatest degree of scalability in large networks you should install the ReportCenter Report Server without a local Collection Agent (standalone), and then install one or more Remote Collection Agents on other computers. This separates the disk intensive process of data collection from the disk and CPU intensive report creation and overall administration functions. For guidelines on selecting an installation strategy see View Collection Agents.

Whatever the installation configuration, there can only be one ReportCenter Server installed. It can be located on the same computer as the Collection Agent, or it can be located on a separate computer.

PacketGuide™ for ReportCenter Version 3.1