CompRep Worksheet: Create Comparison Charts

The comparison report worksheet assist you to create a table and charts for one specific data item which should be placed in a table for a specified object instance and then being plotted over a time value. In order to understand the purpose we have to take a look at the typical structure of CSV data sheet. A data sheet typically contains date, time information, information about the subjects for which measurement data is provided and the measurement data. For example an LPAR activity report as shown below shows the reporting systems, and for each LPAR and CPU type measurement data. This is all plotted for multiple date and time values. In the example below we have one reporting system (it is possible to have multiple), 3 processor types (CP, IIP, and ICF) and this for all the date time intervals. If we now want to create a table which lists the “Physical CPU Utilization” from column U, for the CP processor type for all partitions we need to filter out the IIP and ICF processor types and use the LPAR name, or system name or its combination as new colums headers.

Content of the Comparison sheet

The comparison sheet basically consists of two panes: On the left hand side there is corresponding to the Main worksheet the list of columns available in the CSV data sheet and on the right hand the definition table for the new data table and chart.

Example: Creating a LPAR Utilization Report

First we have to select the correct data sheet in our workbook for the LPAR report. As X-Axis we want to use a combined date, time stamp because the data range covers more than one day. As Y-value or axis we want to plot the “Physical LPAR utilization” of the partitions. This value is contained in column 21. As column headers and different objects we use the LPAR and System name of the partitions. This data is contained in column 9. Because the spreadsheet contains different CPU types we want to plot this just for regular CPs. The LCP type is contained in column 11, which we place in the first “Select Column” entry of the data filter. As comparison criteria we use “Begins With” and we enter CP as comparison String. You can also specify multiple criteria which is not required in this example. If you use multiple criteria they are always additive and thus refine the selection.

Finally we have to provide a “chart name”, that is required, and optionally we can specify a chart title and Y-axis description. If the chart title is omitted the column header of the selected Y-axis column is used. This is “Physical LPAR Utilization” in our example. It is always advised to specify a Y-axis title for the new chart. Finally we can specify up to 2 charts. In our example we want to plot the LPAR utilization in a stacked area chart and scale this chart to 100. In addition we want to plot the data also in a line chart. Then we press “Create Comparison Chart” to create the data table and the two charts.

New Data Table

The new data worksheet is named “Data_Util_nn” and it is has a tab color of red: . In our example the sequence number is set to 11. The two corresponding charts precede the data table. The layout of the table is shown below. The data from column 9 now creates the new columns and column 1 is used for the X-Axis. The measurement data from column 21 is contained in the table for each interval.

Result Charts

The corresponding charts are shown below.