Tracking the Usefulness of Your BI Deployment
While attempting to install, deploy, administer, maintain, improve, and be the general master of your business intelligence deployment with SAP Business Objects Enterprise, it often becomes difficult to determine what metrics you should use for determining the usefulness of your deployment. The goal of this post is to share some insights into those metrics that have been useful in my experience. This is, by no means, a comprehensive list nor is it, necessarily, the correct list for you. The idea here is to provide with you some points to think about as you start planning what you should be monitoring and tracking with your own deployments. As such, I’d love to read your thoughts whether they be via the comments on this post or on twitter.
Eliminating Runaway Content with Sherlock®
Upon getting access to a BI system that has some means of self-service, users can become a little excited at the prospects of getting access to information that has long been hidden behind the wall of IT. They can now create their own reports. They can pull down data, analyze it, and turn it into something that their various teams can action. They can create schedules where important information can be updated while they’re sleeping and be sent to all of their team members. It’s a world of free flowing information and it has all been made possible by the wonderful BI product that they’ve purchased – SAP BusinessObjects in our case.
Sherlock® 2.0 Root Out the Errors
Continuing on with new things coming in Sherlock 2.0, we’ve provided great enhancements around what we log within the inspection process. This was important to us because we want Sherlock to be another trusted source of information. If Sherlock is missing data about your SAP BusinessObjects platforms, then the value is diminished. To that end, let’s get specific on capturing what Sherlock is doing within your environment.
Reducing Failed Scheduled Jobs – My Soap Box
If you’ve heard me present on Sherlock lately, you’ve heard me talk about scheduled job failures and what they do within your environment. Wherever I go, I take some tools with me to monitor and help to tune the percentage of scheduled job failures within an environment. I’d really like to share some of that with you.
Thinking About a Document Archive Approach
There comes a time when SAP Business Objects report instances/history is well…too much history. We really do get pretty effective controls in the form of limits (controlled via the CMS of course). However, retention requirements for SOX or other regulatory rules may be dictated from on high which can cause the amount of content in XI to get slightly out of hand.