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

© Copyright IBM Corporation 2007. All rights reserved. The information contained in these materials is provided for informational purposes only, and is provided AS IS without warranty of any kind, express or implied. IBM shall not be responsible for any damages arising out of the use of, or otherwise related to, these materials. Nothing contained in these materials is intended to, nor shall have the effect of, creating any warranties or representations from IBM or its suppliers or licensors, or altering the terms and conditions of the applicable license agreement governing the use of IBM software. References in these materials to IBM products, programs, or services do not imply that they will be available in all countries in which IBM operates. Product release dates and/or capabilities referenced in these materials may change at any time at IBM’s sole discretion base on market opportunities or other factors, and are not intended to be a commitment to future product or feature availability in any way. IBM, the IBM logo, the on-demand business logo, Rational, the Rational logo, and other IBM products and services are trademarks of the International Business Machines Corporation, in the United States, other countries or both. Other company, product, or service names may be trademarks or service marks of others.