Welcome back to our S headquarters, quick start videos. We're going to continue our series with reporting and discuss a performance report by group. Hopefully we are able to view the other videos where I covered a configuration report as well as a top 10 across group report. You may remember that I mentioned that I will go into more detail about performance by using the performance report capability by group. Also with that as an example, we're going to show you some automation with command line interface. So first, the kind of strategy for command line automation is we create an XML file, run the C to just test that XML as a parameter and then create a windows task schedule.
So here are some of the possibilities with command line operations, you can create reports. You can actually start SAN HQ the server that you want to be defaulted on the time range or the group ID. And there's some other options. You can also create an archive, that's that binary file. Hopefully, you saw my video on performance analysis, which we do discuss what that archive file is and how you can use that. Uh You can create an export as well. That's the CS V version of the San HQ data. And you can also add a new group and this is very handy for large environments where you need to add multiple groups at once. And that's brand new with version 2.5 in the San HQ users guide. This is for version 2.5.
It shows you three ways to preserve data. Of course, creating reports is one of those ways also archiving group data and exporting group data. So some of the main tenets of creating a report that has the command line option is that you have to actually generate a command line. So we're gonna show you the XML file that's created from that and it looks like this. So we have a little XML file that will have uh some features to it and title and the time and the actual uh IP address of the group that you're creating a report for. And then there is a command, the same HQ client. This is for the report where there is a parameter reporting settings file that uses that XML as input. All right. So we're going to show that.
So click on report wizard and then performance report. We'll go through the usual steps here. I want to point out one thing here. I did change my server name from default to an actual name that makes sense to me. But this is the same type of A P series array configuration. I am still on the same HQ client. By the way, you can be on the server if you'd like. Now, here's a, here's one of the main changes I wanted to show you is that you can actually click on time range and that gives you the ability to be very specific. For this example, I just wanted to capture this time frame. So let's try and do that. Let's capture the end date to capture some of this little normal period if you will right around 1700.
So we'll go up to about 1700. And here is where we're going to create a command line that gives us that XML. And we're gonna make the uh report file name, cli demo distinguish from the uh other uh reports that we have. And here you can actually add additional automation. You can actually email that report once it's generated to your email address. Of choice. Of course, you have SNTP server, you just like automatically email, but you'd have to have that all set up. I do not have that set up in this configuration. So we'll just click next and then we're going to generate the command line. So this is where we're validated that all that XML is good. And you can see that you can actually make changes here if you wanted to. There's lots of options here. You can actually change the begin and end date or the type of report, which instead of a range, it could be point in time and you can change things like the group IP.
So there's lots of flexibility by going with this method of XML, you can change it here and it'll actually validate this little XML reader. If you will, we're going to save this XML file. Here's the directory where I created that XML file. You can see some of the previous reports that we created are still in this directory. Then you can see the actual installation directory for the SAN HQ client. Remember we're going to execute the SAN HQ client. So all that I have to do is execute SAN HQ client, pass it the XML file to the parameter, report settings, file, run as administrator. Make sure it's I always do this just to make sure I don't run into any other problems with access here. I'm gonna update the path. So check in the path, then we'll just type in the new path name so we can get access to the N HQ installation directory, bringing a CD to the path for the XML file.
So from here, I will now just execute the command, passing it the XML file to the report settings, file parameter. You'll see that it'll create the report same way you've seen before where it's actually opening up the log reader. And then once that is done, it'll actually show you the location of the file and there is the location of the file. It's a hot link, you can actually click on that and it'll open up the report itself. We're going to read this performance report created by that command line that we just demonstrated is the performance report for this time range that we thought was interesting. About 325 to almost six o'clock. We see about at that time, the average is about 4054 reads with 484 writes about 100 and four megabytes sent with about 65 megabytes received very good re latency and right latency at the group level.
So the reads and right IOPS are indicated by that second chart right there where we have a spike of around 12,000 IOPS around four o'clock note that the average block size is fairly small up to that point. And then this is the top chart that I'm pointing to right now and then that block size increases over time. And then we have a kind of a steady state of IOPS of around 6000 IOPS right around here. Also, we can see that the latency coincides with our IOPS. So we have the highest latency during our IOPS in this, these two charts, if you look at that very good low latency of this lower uh more steady state io load latency looks like it's more reasonable. Now, this is still at the group level, you can also see that the Q depth is highest during that high ale load and low block size and then goes back down with the larger block size. And the lower aisle here's a nice little chart that shows throughput and latency. And this kind of gives you a scatter chart to represent latency versus your aisles per second coming in the array. And right here, you can see around three milliseconds of latency. I'm reading the X axis there and about 12,000 s reading the Y axis there, throughput spikes at about 200 megabytes per second.
No reset, retransmissions of TCP. So that's a good sign. We don't have any indicators and the next level granularity will be at the pool level. So if we look at the pool statistics, we're going to get those same kind of metrics only defined to that pool. And that's good because that gives us the full resource scope. The group level can be averaged out over multiple pools. So you really do want to dive down at least to the pool level and then the member level. So here we have the pool with the same kind of metrics. Obviously, the default pools where all this io load occurred latency again following the same kind of pattern. And here we have the latency, of course, and that's gonna be exactly the same as what we saw at the group because the average is at that level. The details at the member are very similar to what you get from the group level, you get the same metrics block size, your average iops over time, your latency and the scatter chart that shows iepts versus average laid c as we saw before, as well as throughput and TCP retransmits. Now that we've covered how to read the performance report and we're satisfied with that type of report.
We're going to go ahead and automate it from what we showed previously with testing the command line. This is the XML file. I did have to make a couple changes to this XML file. First of all, I changed a data type from a ranged to a point and you can actually do this through the wizard, but I'm just showing you through XML notepad by the way, that's a free product to download from Microsoft's website and also change the time from a begin in span to a previous eight hours. So this will give us a report eight hours previous to when it's run for a point in time type of report. This is good for a reoccurring report. And now I'm going to go into the Microsoft task scheduler and show you the different task schedule library items. And these are the tasks that are currently running on the system and we're going to create a new task.
So we click, create task and here I'll enter in the name and I'm going to call its HQ report automation demo and give it a brief description and the trigger will be the actual schedule that I want this to run. So I'm going to create a daily report that occurs every day at 4:40 p.m. And then the actions is where you actually kick off your command. So this will be the San HQ client command that we want to run. So first of all, we have to go to locate our San HQ installation directory and I'm just showing you that right there through Windows Explorer. But we're going to browse to that as well. So we go to program files, ecologic, SAN HQ. And then when we find the SAN HQ client, we'll click on that and then click open. So we have that full path in there. We're going to start in the directory where the XML file exists. This just gives us a little more flexibility now to do is when we pass the argument, we just have to pass that XML file instead of the full directory path.
So here is the directory path of where we keep our XML files. I'll just simply copy that and then I'll paste it into this field here under the new action. Here, I will add the argument that we tested earlier. So basically, I have a notepad where I copied some information. Uh This is the actual full command that worked for us before. So here I'll just paste that in there. There's some other advanced features that you can check as well. There's conditions, for instance, if you need to start this task, when the computer is idle, there's some other settings that you can select. But for our case, we're just going to click. Ok. Now we see we have a new task task in our test schedule library, the same HQ report automation demo that we just created and it'll run every day at 4:40 p.m.
So the best thing to do at this point is to test this and make sure this schedule will work as we, you know, specify. And here it is, you can see that it's generating that report and now opening the reader and as it saves a report, we're going to go look back at the same HQ report directory to see that it creates this report with the time stamp that it ran A P to the file name that concludes our series on reports. And hopefully you gain some valuable information on how to read a couple of these reports and how to automate them as well.
