Designing processes - EMC Community Network

Monitoring Business Activity
(PRS). Crystal Reports are designed first in PRS and then opened in the Crystal Report software
where report design continues.
Consider the following points when deciding whether to use simple reports or Crystal Reports:
• Report formatting: While simple reports offer some formatting options, Crystal Reports offers
more, including the use of report headers and watermarks. Crystal Reports has a greater selection of
chart types and a richer syntax for writing computed column formulas. If you require a high degree
of control over the look and feel of a report, then Crystal Reports is the best option.
• Amount of report data: If you implement large grid reports with greater than 1,000 records, use
Crystal Reports to improve performance. Use simple reports for smaller grid reports.
Cleaning production environments
Purging permanently deletes data from the BAM database, so developing a purging strategy is
recommended. Ultimately, what to purge and how often to purge depends on how quickly the BAM
database table space fills up. Your purge strategy also depends on how long you must keep BAM
data for reporting purposes. One approach is to generate a dump file of the BAM database on a
periodic basis, and then purge the entire BAM database. Historic data can be restored when required.
Depending on the volume of process data, your strategy can be to take a snapshot of the BAM
database every three or six months.
Another strategy to use is to selectively purge tables that contain a lot of data. In BAM, there are
instance-level tables and nine types of aggregation tables. Over the course of a single day, for instance,
the 5 minutes aggregation table holds 288 rows, over a week it holds 2016 rows, and over a year this
aggregation table holds 105,210 rows of data. The 5 minute aggregation data may not be useful to you
beyond a few months, so purging this table every six months is probably reasonable. The same can be
said of the 15 minutes aggregation table, although this table holds less data than the 5 minutes table,
with 35,040 rows per year compared to 105,210 for the 5 minute table.
Custom aggregation
Your need to define custom aggregation report entities relates to the attributes you have selected to
monitor. As a practical matter, do not collect data unless you absolutely must. If you need process
data only once, then collect it at the end. If you need data more than once, for multiple activities in
a process, then you may have problems with business data aggregation. For example, if a numeric
attribute value during Activity A is 3 and the same attribute value for Activity D is 9, then the
calculated average is 6, which is inaccurate. In reality, the value that should be incorporated into the
calculation is 9, not 6. In these cases, custom aggregation report entities must be created. Custom
aggregation must also be used when you want to combine data from multiple data sources and in
situations when you need to combine process data and business data. For example, if you want to
calculate the average duration it takes to process orders from the state of California, then custom
aggregation must be used. Custom aggregation can also be used to improve BAM server performance
when report aggregation attempts to collapse thousands and thousands of instance-level data.
For more on custom aggregation, please see the Creating Custom Aggregation, Report, and Filter
Entities chapter of the Business Activity Monitor Implementation Guide.
92 EMC Documentum xCelerated Composition Platform Version 1.6 Best Practices Guide