It has always been best-practice to not trend regular string parameters, for obvious reasons.
I wonder though if the same applies to string parameters of type ‘discreet’?
What are the specific features – could be client and/or server side – which are not supported for such parameters?
Should we always aim to convert these to numerical discreets?
What’s Skyline’s advise on this?
Trending on string parameters (including string discreets) are not supported in the web and mobile applications (Reports & Dashboards, Monitoring, Custom apps, WebAPIs). So if you want to view the trending in these apps it will be better to use numerical discreets.
In DataMiner Cube, discreets can all be visualized. They will be evenly distributed on the y axis. Differences with numerical data:
- There is no numeric averaging. This means that the background area for min/max values will be shown across the entire y range from the moment a discreet average point didn’t occur across the entire time slot.
- There is no minimum and maximum value for the average points. Instead these contain
- info on how much of the time the average value (the value that occurred the longest) actually occurred (in %)
- What the median value was (aka the value that was set the most times in the time slot)
For string trending, there’s an added difference:
- At most, 20 different values will be visualized. If there are any more, they will be categorized on y axis value “(other)”.