In this chapter, we looked at the basic and bar reports that are available in Zabbix. Basic reports allowed us to examine Zabbix state, figure out which triggers fire most often, and create basic availability reports with some charts.
The other category was bar reports, which required more configuration and were more complex, in turn providing very flexible functionality. Most of the bar report usefulness is evident for longer periods like several months or years, although figuring out the effect of some event on a smaller scale can be nice also, like reporting on what happened during slashdotting. With the flexibility of bar reports it can sometimes be hard to figure out which one should be used. We can try to simplify this problem by considering some a typical questions that a particular report can answer:
Distribution of values for multiple periods
What amount of web server processes was started on each web server every week last month, grouped by week?
Distribution of values for...