What Are Reports, Monitors and Plots?

Reports provide a computed summary of simulation or system data.

They are contained within the Reports manager node in the object tree, and have varying properties that depend on their type.

Monitors provide a mechanism for sampling summary information from the simulation during runtime. Some built-in monitors are provided for residuals that the various solvers compute. User-defined monitors can be created based on reports that are contained within the Reports manager node.

Plots provide line graphs containing information that is supplied from; monitors, extracted simulation data, tables, or derived data sets. These plots can be customized with different line and point properties, axes, scales, titles, and so on.

An example object tree showing all three of these object types is shown below. In this particular example, the Drag and Lift Coefficient reports have been used to create monitors, which in turn have been used within a single plot called Force Coefficients Plot.