Best Practices and Lessons Learned on Our IBM Rational Insight Deployment
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Transcript of Best Practices and Lessons Learned on Our IBM Rational Insight Deployment
The premiere software and product delivery event.June 6–10 Orlando, Florida
Best Practices & Lessons Learned on Our Insight DeploymentRational Unleash The Labs
June 7th, 2010
Rick Weaver, Director, Unleash The LabsMarc Nehme, Rational Specialist, Unleash The Labs
Unleash The Labs - Who We Are
Central point of contact within the Rational Development organization
Situations: pre-sales, post-sales, PoC, PoT, implementations, demonstrations, Product Management
requests
Improve communications and alignment between Rational Development and the Rational field
Manage customer interactions, engagements, opportunities
Engage appropriate teams to ensure customer success
Our Objectives
Improve ROI by moving to an automated reporting process
Improve visibility across our organization –Identify high priority objectives
Have a central location where metrics are accessible
Create ”On-Demand” & Trend reports
Create multiple views/levels of our reports
Drink our own champagne, Tell our story, Demonstrate success with Rational Insight
Reporting Challenges
Organizational unity & process
Various data sources
Disparate data sources
Individual product (distinct) reporting solutions
Lack of functionality/express
Training & resources
Manual data manipulation
Overall manual process
Effort/time required
ManualData
ProjectData
Headcount&
Financials
RationalTeam Concert
RationalQuality
Manager
RationalClearQuest
Rational Insight’s Value
BEFORE
AFTER
CQ
CQDW & Report Server
Staff
Organization Portal Data Source 1) Export Data2) Massage data & Create reports3) Create presentation slides4) Create email to stakeholders
Stakeholders
Organization Portal Data Source Stakeholders
“On-Demand” Access
Insight Portal
Automated Integration
Staff focuses on other tasks
Our Results - Live Dashboards
Our Results - Trend Dashboards
Our Results – Other Metrics
Moved from an 80% manual reporting process to an 80% automated reporting process
Migrated ALL of our major reports to IBM Rational Insight
Saved about 40 work hours per month
Saved IBM $$$
“Through the automation and dashboard capabilities in Insight, our team is saving about 40 hours a month on our reporting activities. We also can offer new capabilities such as “on-demand” dashboards which would have been very labor intensive to do without Insight”
Rick Weaver, Program Director of “IBM Rational Unleash the Labs”
Since leveraging IBM Rational Insight for our reporting processes, we have:
Our Organization’s Savings
Phased Approach to Success
Crawl Walk Run
Focus on key/core requirements and set a goal to achieve those objectives
With the future picture in mind, create a foundational structure for your business
Requirements may not all be created before deployment - Your first results will spawn new requirements
Start with one data source, one business area, one set of reports
Phased Approach to Success
Crawl Walk Run
For initial deployment and enablement, start with the simplest use case reporting - Run through Live data reporting process (XDC, FM, QS)
Data Warehouse – ODS (DM, RS)
Data Warehouse – Data marts
The MCIF approach is a systematic iterative approach for measurably improving capability,aligned with business goals and objectives
Best Practices / Lessons Learned
Insight improves data capturing
Insight will highlight high-level analytics, but also drill down to lower level detail
This will show how well your organization is following your data capturing process
Be prepared to make some tweaks to the source data schemas and process to accommodate for certain data achievements in Insight
Source data needs to be accurate as inaccurate or incomplete data can disrupt the Insight reports
Misleading data, empty reports, etc
Best Practices / Lessons Learned
Insight Deployment Management
Identify atleast two people to own/manage the deployment
Developer role – Back end work: product integration, data extraction, data transformation, Data Warehouse loading, Data modeling
Report Author – Front end work: Dashboard/report designs, everything the end user will see
Best Practices / Lessons Learned
Deployment tips
Always stay on latest fixpack
Maintain test environment
Take regular backups of reports/dashboards via the Cognos homegrown tool (Content Administration)
Importing work into other environments is transparent to/independent of the backend database
Best Practices / Lessons Learned
Deployment tips
Keep the Data Services Server on a machine other than the Report Server
Data ServicesServer
Report Server&
Database Server&
Developer tools
ClearQuestServer
Unleash The Labs Deployment Topology
Best Practices / Lessons Learned
Deployment tips
Report Server/Database Server
Dual Core Processor (2.x+ Ghz)
4GB RAM
Free hard disk space varies on anticipated size of Data Warehouse
(minimum 10GB)
Data Services Server
Dual Core Processor (2.x+ Ghz)
4GB RAM (just CQ client & adapter installed)
Free hard disk space: Minimum 10GB
Best Practices / Lessons Learned
Deployment tips
Data ServicesServer
Report Server
ClearQuestServer
Best Practice Topology
ReqProServer
RQMServer
ETLServer
Database Server
Best Practices / Lessons Learned
Deployment Performance Tweaks
Behavior: First report of the day seems to take a bit longer to execute – the following reports seem much more efficient
Likely Cause: BIBusTKServerMain.exe not initialized –the process takes time to initialize when no activity (report server process). Two processes needed for interactive reporting
Solution: Increase the idleTimeLimitSec to a longer period (default is 900 seconds) in reportservice.xml file
<installdir>\cognos\webapps\p2pd\WEB-INF\services
<installdir>\AppServer\profiles\RationalInsight\installedApps\sma-unleashNode01Cell\IBM Cognos 8.ear\p2pd.war\WEB-INF\services
Best Practices / Lessons Learned
Deployment Performance Tweaks Behavior: Reports are hanging and never execute
Possible Cause 1: AIO function in WAS – there are several issues which the asynchronous input/output transfer code might expose
Solution 1: Disable AIO
Renames or delete these two files: ibmaio.dll & ibmaiodbg.dll located
here: <installdir>\ AppServer\bin
Best Practices / Lessons Learned
Deployment Performance Tweaks
Behavior: Reports are hanging and never execute
Possible Cause 2: WAS thread pool size not large enough
Solution 2: Increase WAS thread pool size from default 10 to 25 threads
WAS console > Servers > Application Servers > RationalInsightServer > Additional Properties > Thread Pools > WebContainer
Warning: Doing this AND disabling AIO will cause your Insight web portal to become inaccessible
Best Practices / Lessons Learned
Prior to setting up an extraction from a new data source, its important that a person understands the basics of the data source’s purpose, what it is capturing, and its schema, so that you know how to structure the data
Insight Knowledge
Best Practices / Lessons Learned
Where applicable, utilizing the out of the box models is very helpful in avoiding rework
We saved a good amount of time leveraging the development team’s effort of creating data models and ETL jobs
Insight Knowledge
Best Practices / Lessons Learned
In Data Manager, it is good to understand the OOTB fact builds and lookup tables and what they do – avoids alot of rework
Know and review the the OOTB DW tables so that when developing, you’ll be familiar with the tables and fields captured
Insight Knowledge
Best Practices / Lessons Learned
Prior Cognos experience a plus, but not required
Start Query Studio – move to Report Studio
Insight Reporting
Use the OOTB reports as as guide and an enablement tool
Help Index, Google, trial & error – face time
Practice makes perfect !
Best Practices / Lessons Learned
Start with learning formatting, filters, and aggregates
Move to parameter passing, prompts, and multiple query reports
Insight Reporting – Best Practices
Best Practices / Lessons Learned
Contain the number of Live reports on any given dashboard – load times could be painful and the servers may get overloaded at times
Create generic drill through (target) reports that can be linked to, from several front end reports, using parameter passing - time saver
Insight Reporting – Best Practices
Best Practices / Lessons Learned
World Map report works great for geographic distribution of workloads & headcount and is a big attraction to viewers
Pie charts & bar charts with associated drill-through reports were key for our deployment
Insight Reporting – Lessons Learned
Best Practices / Lessons Learned
Conditional formatting was very useful to identify high-priority objectives
Helped raise awareness with immediate notification of critical situations
“Watch Rules” provide automated notification
Insight Reporting – Lessons Learned
Best Practices / Lessons Learned
Leverage the multi-product integration capability of Insight – Adapter, REST, ODBC
Integrating with Excel can be helpful and painless if crucial data is stored in xls sheets and is needed to be reported on in Insight
Create tables in Excel sheet, integrate with Insight via ODBC driver, business as usual
Insight Reporting – Lessons Learned
Best Practices / Lessons Learned
Set aside time (account for) testing and debugging of reports/deployment when scoping your work
Some of the Cognos tools (Data Manager, Report Studio, etc) have been out for years before Insight’s release - there are a number of public resources available to you
Stay connected with the Insight community as most likely there is someone out there who has faced the challenges you may be facing
General Tips
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