Historical reports in Nobl9
Historical reports in Nobl9 allow you to get data-driven insights into your service level objectives. With Nobl9 reports, you can resolve critical questions for your business: for instance, whether to focus on the development of new features or on managing your technical debt.
You can create custom reports besides displaying the ready-made Resource usage summary report.
You can also download the generated reports and share them with other users in your organization.
Types of reports
The following types of Reports are available in Nobl9:
The Resource Usage Summary report is ready-made and is always available under the Reports tab.
SLO History
This report type allows you to check the performance of your SLOs. It is helpful for in-depth analyses of events and can be used by teams working in different time zones who want to see the same data in reports.
SLO History reports can be configured with two types of reporting time ranges:
- Rolling presents data according to the selected time range that dynamically moves as time progresses. For example, if you set the rolling time range to
1 month, you will see data for the past 30 days up to the current time of the report opening. - Calendar-aligned range is tied to a specific range of time on the calendar with a clear start and stop date
Error Budget Status
This report type gives you the percentage of errors in the selected time frame. It provides you with a quick and easy way to verify the statuses of SLOs. The Reliability column shows a reliability burn down rate for every SLO in the report.
Resource Usage Summary
This report shows the number of resources and SLO units configured in Nobl9 and their peak usage.
An SLO unit represents the number of individual error budgets calculated by Nobl9. Each SLO contains at least one error budget, and every additional target set within an SLO adds another error budget. For instance, if a threshold metric has three targets, it amounts to three SLO units. In Nobl9 Web, each SLO unit appears as a separate tile on the SLO grid view.
See Nobl9 pricing for more details.
Since the Resource Usage Summary report is ready-made, its Reporting Time Range is always the current month.
Reliability Roll-up
This report allows Nobl9 users to gain a bird's-eye view of their Services' aggregated reliability over an extended period of time. Check Reliability Roll-up reports documentation for more details.
While Reliability Roll-up reports can seem similar to composite SLOs, they are two different tools to access the resource's performance.
- Reliability Roll-up report: Error budget
- Composite SLO: Burn rate
- Benefits
- ☺ Flexible hierarchy. It means you can boil down many systems to a single number instead of sticking to the Nobl9 data model
- ☺ Measures reliability as needed: by user journey, organization, team, application, etc.
- ☺ Updated with labels
- ☺ Easy to share
- Drawbacks
- ☹ Currently, reliability scores are updated daily at 00:00 UTC
- ☹ You must set alerts at the level of individual SLOs when necessary
- ☹ Focuses on SLO target adherence, not specific error budget numbers
- Benefits
- ☺ Permanently available burn rate
- ☺ Continuous composite error budget calculations providing a graphical representation
- Drawbacks
- ☹ Burn rates are evaluated in real time. It limits the number of signals included in a single composite
- ☹ Computationally intensive
Compares the burn rates for existing SLO objectives and marks the minutes bad in the composite SLO when burn rates exceed your set threshold.
Creating reports
Prerequisites
You must have at least one service in Nobl9 to create a new custom report. If you don't have any services, the 
button will be inactive, and building a new report won’t be possible:
If you've already created services but there are no SLOs attached to them, Nobl9 will display the following screen:
Once you have services and SLOs, you can create your custom report. For this, click the report creation button. The Report wizard opens:
Overview of creation steps
The Report wizard contains two or three steps, depending on your chosen report type. Step 3 Select Time Range is not shown for the Error budget report. For this report type, Nobl9 always displays the current time ranges of selected SLOs. That's why you can't change it.
Here is an overview of all the steps required to create reports:
Step 1: Name report and choose its type
-
Type in the name of your report in the Report Name field.
This will be the display name that you and other users in your organization will later see in Nobl9. The name can:- Have a maximum of 63 characters.
- Contain special characters, including emojis that may make the name of your report more visually appealing and improve the report's discoverability for other users.
-
Select the Report Type.
Here you can choose between the SLO History, Error Budget Status, and Reliability Roll-up:
The type of report you choose at Step 1 determines if Step 3 is then presented in the Report wizard. You can select time range for SLO history or Reliability roll-up reports only.
Step 2: Define report scope
To define the scope of the report, fill out at least one of the following fields:
If there are more than 500 SLOs in your organization, you can experience downgraded performance, creating a report. Our team is currently working on fixing this issue.
Filtering by report fields
Search for the projects, services, and service level objectives you need to include in your report. You can type their names or select them in the list.
Projects, Services, and Service Level Objectives are interconnected: choosing options in one field narrows down the results available in other fields. The dependency is project > service > SLO.
For example:
- Select a specific project, so the Services field displays services that a part of the project you've selected.
- Select a specific service, so the Service Level Objectives field displays SLOs that are part of the service you've selected.
- Leave the Projects and Services fields blank, so you have access to all available SLOs in the Service Level Objectives field.
- Select several projects or services, so the available options in their dependent fields are part of all the projects or services you selected.
Labels
The Labels field is optional. It also filters the data displayed in a report.
You can’t define the report scope with a label only. Primarily, you must fill out at least one project, service, or SLO, and use labels as the additional option.
You can choose from all the labels that you have in Nobl9. To filter out a specific resource, you don't have to use a label attached directly to that resource.
A project in Nobl9 contains two SLOs. The project has no labels; SLO 1 has label-1, and SLO 2 has label-2. To build a report with data related to SLO 1, select either this project + label-1 or all projects and label-1.
Data in reports over time
Note that the data displayed in a report may change.
If you create a report with no services and SLOs, the report will show no data. However, if a service with SLOs is added to that project later, the service with your SLOs will appear in your report.
And vice-versa: if you build a report with services and SLOs and then remove SLOs from the service, the report will show no data.
Step 3: Select time range
There are two types of time ranges available:
Rolling time range
If you choose the Rolling Time Range, the selected time range (for example, Last one week, last two weeks, last one quarter, etc.) is dynamically calculated starting from when you open or refresh the report.
Calendar-aligned time range
The Calendar-Aligned Time Range reflects the calendar periods, such as the Last Calendar Month (from June 1 to June 30) or the Last Week (from Sunday through Saturday).
You can select a custom period for calendar-aligned time ranges:
You can also explore historical time ranges for both time range types:
You can choose a specific time zone used in your report. Although the users who access the report might be in different time zones, the data they will see in the report will be the same.
Accessing report list
Click Reports main sidebar, to go to the report list containing all reports available for you: your created reports and shared with you by other users.
Here you can create, view, and sort reports.
Click the required report in the list to view its details and access the available options.
share the report and copy the link to it
Allowed for report owners only
download a CSV file with the report data
Available for the Error Budget Status reports only
edit the report
The Report wizard opens
delete the report permanently
An Organization Admin can see all the shared reports within the organization.
If the report owner loses access to the report resources, they will still be able to view this report on the report list.
In such a situation, the report's details will indicate that the user has limited access to its data. The report creator can still share or delete the report but won't be able to make any edits.
The detailed view of the report contains helpful information about your report.
The report preview fields explained: