Designing processes - EMC Community Network
Designing processes - EMC Community Network 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
Monitoring Business Activity Leveraging the Preconfigured Dashboards The Preconfigured Dashboards, and the reports on which they are based, are an excellent source of learning and should be leveraged whenever possible. The simplest approach is to use the Preconfigured Dashboard reports to learn about data source creation and report design. In this way, users can reverse engineer the reports to learn how they were designed. Another way to leverage the Preconfigured Dashboard reports is to open them for editing in PRS, and add and/or remove data as appropriate. For instance, add SDT or package attribute data to the List of Process Instance report, since business data is not included in any of the Preconfigured Dashboard reports. CAUTION: If you modify any of the Preconfigured Dashboard reports, you must understand how to reformat the chart data. Adding and subtracting data disturbs the X-axis and Y-axis settings. Another approach to leveraging the Preconfigured Dashboards is to design a report and replace one of the dashlets in either of the three dashboards. With this approach you do not need to design a dashboard from scratch, you are simply replacing the contents of a dashboard that already exists. You are not required to create a dashboard tab, or assign the tab to roles, as is typically required when you design a dashboard. Keep in mind, though, that editing a dashboard changes the contents for users that are viewing it. Dashboard refresh intervals BAM dashboards can be configured to refresh after a certain interval of time. While there is no absolute best practice regarding refresh intervals, it is recommended that you determine how often you need to see updated data. If you have low volumes of long running processes, then a refresh interval of every few days may suffice. If you have high volumes of processes and your data changes frequently, then more regularly scheduled refresh periods is more appropriate. Refresh intervals are scheduled in minutes. Since refreshing a dashboard is somewhat demanding on the BAM system, it is important that you balance your needs with the frequency with which the data changes. Designing drill-down reports Single and multi-drill-down reports are configured with a source report and a target report. It is best practice to design the target report first, so that it is available on picklists when the source report is designed. Formatting reports to be more readable There are a few methods for making BAM dashboard reports more readable: • Entering a report title and subtitle in the Chart Properties window is not necessary since the name of the report appears in the title bar of the dashlet. EMC Documentum xCelerated Composition Platform Version 1.6 Best Practices Guide 93
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Monitoring Business Activity<br />
(PRS). Crystal Reports are designed first in PRS and then opened in the Crystal Report software<br />
where report design continues.<br />
Consider the following points when deciding whether to use simple reports or Crystal Reports:<br />
• Report formatting: While simple reports offer some formatting options, Crystal Reports offers<br />
more, including the use of report headers and watermarks. Crystal Reports has a greater selection of<br />
chart types and a richer syntax for writing computed column formulas. If you require a high degree<br />
of control over the look and feel of a report, then Crystal Reports is the best option.<br />
• Amount of report data: If you implement large grid reports with greater than 1,000 records, use<br />
Crystal Reports to improve performance. Use simple reports for smaller grid reports.<br />
Cleaning production environments<br />
Purging permanently deletes data from the BAM database, so developing a purging strategy is<br />
recommended. Ultimately, what to purge and how often to purge depends on how quickly the BAM<br />
database table space fills up. Your purge strategy also depends on how long you must keep BAM<br />
data for reporting purposes. One approach is to generate a dump file of the BAM database on a<br />
periodic basis, and then purge the entire BAM database. Historic data can be restored when required.<br />
Depending on the volume of process data, your strategy can be to take a snapshot of the BAM<br />
database every three or six months.<br />
Another strategy to use is to selectively purge tables that contain a lot of data. In BAM, there are<br />
instance-level tables and nine types of aggregation tables. Over the course of a single day, for instance,<br />
the 5 minutes aggregation table holds 288 rows, over a week it holds 2016 rows, and over a year this<br />
aggregation table holds 105,210 rows of data. The 5 minute aggregation data may not be useful to you<br />
beyond a few months, so purging this table every six months is probably reasonable. The same can be<br />
said of the 15 minutes aggregation table, although this table holds less data than the 5 minutes table,<br />
with 35,040 rows per year compared to 105,210 for the 5 minute table.<br />
Custom aggregation<br />
Your need to define custom aggregation report entities relates to the attributes you have selected to<br />
monitor. As a practical matter, do not collect data unless you absolutely must. If you need process<br />
data only once, then collect it at the end. If you need data more than once, for multiple activities in<br />
a process, then you may have problems with business data aggregation. For example, if a numeric<br />
attribute value during Activity A is 3 and the same attribute value for Activity D is 9, then the<br />
calculated average is 6, which is inaccurate. In reality, the value that should be incorporated into the<br />
calculation is 9, not 6. In these cases, custom aggregation report entities must be created. Custom<br />
aggregation must also be used when you want to combine data from multiple data sources and in<br />
situations when you need to combine process data and business data. For example, if you want to<br />
calculate the average duration it takes to process orders from the state of California, then custom<br />
aggregation must be used. Custom aggregation can also be used to improve BAM server performance<br />
when report aggregation attempts to collapse thousands and thousands of instance-level data.<br />
For more on custom aggregation, please see the Creating Custom Aggregation, Report, and Filter<br />
Entities chapter of the Business Activity Monitor Implementation Guide.<br />
92 <strong>EMC</strong> Documentum xCelerated Composition Platform Version 1.6 Best Practices Guide