Example: spotting anomalies in resource tables with aggregation

This example shows how you can use the aggregation functionality to spot anomalies in resource tables.

Suppose you’ve received a report from one of your users that your application is failing intermittently. The error message is something to do with a file.

Open the Local Files view to get started. There’s a lot of data in the Local Files view so you need to cut this down.

You know that the application in question is installed across a few regions and uses a few different files: ACCOUNT, LOG, and CUST. In this case, a quick way to start to make sense of the data in the Local Files view is using the aggregation functionality to group on the name of the file. You can do this by right-clicking the Name column and choosing Group By.

Grouping by Name collects resources together so that each row represents multiple resources with the same name. Attributes in other columns are aggregated by details they have in common and asterisks (*) are used where a difference exists. This means you can quickly spot differences between large numbers of similar records by looking for *s.

In the following screen shot, you can see that out of the 33 files, there are eight unique names. The Name column, which is the grouping column, is highlighted and brought to the left hand side for clarity. The Count column on the far left indicates how many resources are represented by each row.

Also in the same view, for LOG files, you can see that there are three resources with a common region name of IYCWEZ*1 between them, where the * indicates that there is a difference between some of the resources. The status of the records also appears to be different between the three records because it is shown as ****. You need to check what that difference is. You can do that by right-clicking the row and choosing Expand. This opens a temporary expanded view next to the Local Files view you were using. You can see that the expanded view has automatically added a filter for the file name LOG.

The expanded view shows that the LOG file is disabled on IYCWEZH1. This is likely the cause of the intermittently failing application.