Designing processes - EMC Community Network

Chapter 7
Monitoring Business Activity
This chapter discusses the following:
• System requirements
• Reporting requirements
• Dashboard design considerations
• Crystal Reports versus Simple Reports
• Cleaning production environments
• Custom aggregation
• Leveraging the Preconfigured Dashboards
• Dashboard refresh intervals
• Designing drill-down reports
• Formatting reports to be more readable
• Computed Column dates and sorting
System requirements
It is a best practice to use the BAM Sizing Calculator to determine your hardware requirements before
you install Business Activity Monitor. The sizing calculator is available on the EMC Download Center
in the Documentum Business Activity Monitor Supplemental Files zip file. This tool calculates the size
of the BAM database, the BAM server, and the Taskspace/BAM dashboard server, based on several
metrics that you enter, including the number of processes you are monitoring, the number of process
instances monitored per day, and the average number of activities in each process.
Reporting requirements
Planning is the most important step in deploying any component of xCP, including the Business
Activity Monitor. If you are deploying BAM with Process Builder, Forms Builder, and TaskSpace,
it is a best practice to define your reporting requirement as one of your first steps in deploying xCP.
This requires that you brainstorm and design mock-ups of the BAM reports and dashboards that
your business requires, even before you begin to design your process. Your reporting requirements
can have a large impact on how your process is designed and the substance and structure of your data
model, including SDTs and package attributes.
The more detail included in your requirements specifications, the better. At a minimum, reporting
requirements should include:
EMC Documentum xCelerated Composition Platform Version 1.6 Best Practices Guide 89