Viewing statistics

About Statistics in Switch

Switch allows you to collect information on how long jobs reside in certain folders or states while being moved along a flow. This can be useful to identify performance bottlenecks.

There are two types of statistical data:

Folder statistics calculate the average time jobs reside in a folder for which statistics have been enabled.
State statistics calculate the average time jobs reside in a particular state. A state can be attached to a job folder via the Folder property "Attach job state", and allows you to combine information about several folders having the same function, for example "coming in" or "in progress".

Statistics are not limited to a single flow: Switch combines all statistics-enabled folders from all active flows in a single set of statistics. If two or more folders (used in different flows) have the same name, the statistics for these folders are combined in one single entry.

Tip: To receive meaningful results, we recommend calculating statistics only for folders leading to heavy processes, i.e. processes forming a potential bottleneck for resources, such as CPU time or communication bandwidth.

Setting up statistics

To gather Folder statistics, you must enable the Show in statistics property of the folder concerned.
To gather State statistics, you must fill out the Attach job state property of the folder concerned.

You can only gather statistics for a folder that has outgoing connections. Folders at the end of the flow do not have the Show in statistics and Attach job state property, because Switch has no control over the time the jobs reside in such a folder.

Remark

In case of Folder statistics, the calculated time is the queuing time between the moment the job is detected and the the moment the job is handed over for processing on an outgoing connection.
In case of State statistics, this is the queuing and processing time between two different job states. Note that, due to the fact that statistics are only logged when the job state changes, it is necessary to introduce an extra dummy state (which will never be logged) at the end of the last flow element of interest or just before the last folder of the flow (as the last folder has no Attach job state property, hence the job state cannot change). In the following example, the time spent in the "Set to MyState" includes the queuing time in the first folder and the processing time in the generic application ("Process"). The second folder was introduced to change the job state to a dummy value.

Note: The time during which a job is blocked (e.g. because the relevant flow was not active or Switch was not running) is also included in the statistics.

Displaying statistics

To display the Statistics pane, click in the Switch toolbar or go to View > Statistics .

Important: Do not forget to refresh the statistics ( by selecting View > Refresh Statistics ), to make sure the most recent information is displayed.

You can display up to three statistics panes (by clicking View > Show panes > Statistics 2 or Statistics 3) at the same time. This allows you to display a second and third set of statistics (e.g. sorted in a different way).

For more information about this pane, refer to Statistics pane.

Resetting statistics

To remove the collected information, i.e. to set all counters to zero, go to View > Reset Statistics . Switch will start gathering statistics from scratch.