I have adapted the ‘Patches Overview’ reports that is in the Custom Web Reports download section to include the AIX severities instead of the MS severities and have a fantastic report now to give a ‘snapshot’ view of the current environment with AIX issues displayed using the correct IBM severity so the report does not just show all AIX issues as ‘Unclassified’
The next project I have is to create a report containing historic data to display the ‘total issues’ by ‘severity’ showing the number of issues over the last ‘x’ number of days, similar to the total issues graph in the ‘Overview’ report, but with AIX severities.
Please can you let me know how historic data can be can be sourced for the report?
My 3 thoughts are:
There has to be a scheduled job to collect the current data and this is stored in a file that is called when the historic report is viewed.
The DB stores the historic data and this can be accessed directly
Some vastly complicated method that I am never going to be able to utilize
I Hope its #2 !!
Thanks in advance for your help.
EDIT: Forgot to add a Screen shot of my AIX Patches Overview report.
The answer to your question is #2… The BigFix database stores times associated with when Fixlets became relevant and unrelevant, which will give you the historical data. There is a limitation that it doesn’t store every single transition between relevant/non-relevant but just the first and last time the Fixlets were relevant. This generally won’t affect you unless you have lots of Fixlets that transition relevant and non-relevant often (in these cases, you won’t know exactly the times of the intermediate transitions).
As an example, see the “before/after” patch report that we were working on for Microsoft patches recently (and we are starting off with Microsoft patches because that is the most commonly requested, but we will get to the other OSes soon):
This should be hopefully straight-forward to adapt to AIX, but we can help if you would like… The same before/after principle can be extended to the last X days, but it take a little more work to build this custom report… but… you can use the “Fixlet history” report that is built into web reports to get the information you are looking for (which is much easier)…
Thanks for the report pointer, I have created 2 AIX reports based on the above link. The first is a severity only report, one that management likes, and the second is the full patch name report, similar to the MS based version.
Still thinking about working on a complete historic report that will show the number of issues this week v last week and the week before etc, but this is a good start.
One issue is in the ‘Patches Overview’ CSP’s are listed as ‘Unknown’ and when the fixlets for the TL 5300-06 is released later this week this will also be shown as an ‘Unknown’
I hope I can get some time soon to tidy up a few issues that I have.