InetSoft BI Webcast: Adding Business Intelligence on Top of IT Business Solutions
Below is the continuation of the transcript from a Webcast video from InetSoft Technology. The speaker is Mark Flaherty, Vice President of Marketing at InetSoft.
Bord: Can you show on the whiteboard here what you mean by adding business intelligence on top of IT systems?
Flaherty: Great, sure. So something that our own IT department does is use business intelligence on top of our systems center. Our systems center Operations Manager uses it to manage the health of our IT infrastructure and to monitor it. What we have heard a lot of is that IT pros want more and more robust solutions to be able to analyze the data that’s coming out of their systems centers. So today what they get might be three kind of reports which they can see and print out and all that type of stuff. But what they want to do is get some more useful dashboards where they have got a pictorial representation of what is going on, and they can see where they can actually do some of the ad hoc analysis to answer some of the questions that they have.
Our BI software can easily be configured to read the log files of a systems center. I am just going to whiteboard what that architecture looks like and what we have done. So if you are familiar with a systems center, the way that it's made up is that there are managed servers which collect data on the performance of the IT system. It monitors states of different applications inside the system, the performance metrics, counters, and that type of thing. So really we have got state data and performance data which are captured and they are stored in the operations manager.
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Bord: Which is just a big SQL database.
Flaherty: That’s right, yes. And that information then gets trapped for these reports to be created, and that’s trapped in the operations manager database or data warehouse, that information in operational format gets pre-aggregated for these operational reports, these production reports so we have got a data warehouse there. And then these are the reporting services reports generally. So that’s what you have got today.
Now you can layer business intelligence on top of this to get more out of this data that you are collecting. The first thing is that you want to move a subset, the relevant subset of this information into an optimized database that’s in a star schema. So we will call this the operations manager BI data warehouse. From that sort of optimized data warehouse you can then build pre-aggregated cubes. So this is pre-aggregated information that is then easy to analyze and to find trend information through.