Product Version: Since nChronos 3.0
Intended Audience:
- All nChronos users (including Evaluation users)
In last chapter we've learned:
- What are the components of nChronos Console
- The description and use of each statistic view
When we are familiar with the user interface of the console program we can move on and focus on how to use the program. The trend chart is the place where we start our journey. The biggest advantage of this retrospective network analysis product is that we can either have a long term or short term view on our network running status, and we can choose to look into a specific period of time.
By default the trend chart show traffic stats of past 4 minutes and we can see the traffic utilization, packet count, and traffic volume of each second. If we change the window size to 10-day, each scale on the trend chart represents one hour, and the statistics are the sum of each hour. The bigger the window size value, the more resources are required on the server to retrieve and analyze the statistic data.
Move Trend Chart
We can move the trend chart backwards or forwards to see traffic trends. We can do as following to move the time on trend chart:
- Move the cursor to the bottom of the trend chart, the cursor reshapes as a hand. Press and move left or right to slide the time window.
- We can also manually specify the accurate time range by clicking
icon (upper left corner of the time window), and inputting accurate time value in either the start time or end time textbox, and the other one will be worked out automatically.
Looking at the icon area, we still have other icons. First Time Window icon (
) moves to the first time window, Last Time Window icon (
) moves to the last time window, and Auto-refresh icon (
) enables trend chart to refresh automatically, and click it again to cancel auto-refresh.
Select Time Span on Trend Chart
The trend chart shows stats of a settled time length, 4-min, 20-min to 10-day. We click and drag on the trend chart to specify a time period of any smaller size and have a closer look into stats of that time period. Once we select a time span on the trend chart, the views down below the trend chart will automatically retrieve the statistics on that period.
To select a time span:
- Click and drag, back or forth, on the trend chart to specify a time span.
Besides, when a time span is selected, you can move the time span. To move the time span:
- Move the cursor a little above the chart top area, the cursor displays as a hand, Press and left or right to move the time span.
So now we can understand the time concepts of trend chart and time span. The trend chart can show stats from 4 minutes to as long as 10 days. And we can select a small portion of time range on the trend chart, and the views down below will give us stats only on that selected time range.
