Posts Tagged ‘SMI’

Business Objects auditing

March 11th, 2010

Business Objects Enterprise includes auditing functionality that allows you to verify if reports and user management are appropriate, are efficient,

and are adequately controlled to ensure valid, reliable, timely, and secure input, processing, and output at all levels of a system’s activity.


What’s in it for me?

  • A controlled environment in which it’s clear which users and user groups use objects and reports.
  • Root cause analysis to easily relate the disruption of a service to changes and users.
  • Which reports are used and which reports are ‘dead’.
  • It enables efficient license usage. Why pay for want you do not use?

The audit should answer the following questions:

  1. Who is using your reporting solution?
  2. Which groups use your reporting solution the most?
  3. Which objects they are accessing?
  4. Which reports are they using?
  5. How many user licenses are we using at any given time?

You can audit the actions of individual users of Business Objects Enterprise as they log in and out of the system, access data, or create file-based events. You can also monitor system actions like the success or failure of scheduled objects. For each action, Business Objects Enterprise records the time of the action, the name and user group of the user who initiated the action, the server where it was performed, and a variety of other parameters available in the documentation with Business Objects.

The auditable actions I like the most are:

  • Track when Objects are created, deleted of modified;
  • Track when reports are opened, saved, refreshed, created, modified and deleted;
  • Job monitoring and failure;
  • Changes and history in login behaviour of users and groups;
  • Monitoring of license usage.

A post last year on the Chennai Bi blog gives some useful guidelines on how to implement auditing: http://chennaibi.wordpress.com/2009/04/07/business-objects-auditing-in-xir3/

Martijn

Vivit HP Service Management SIG update

March 8th, 2010

Latest news from the Vivit HP Service Management Special Interest Group

HP Service Management at the HP Universe 2010 in Washington DC:

If you’re planning on attending the HP Universe event, there are several activities and sessions taking place that might be of interest to you

1) Vivit training sessions

There are two special Vivit training sessions taking place:

- The first is called ” A practical approach to operational reporting from HP Service Manager and HP Service Center” (https://www.hpsoftwareuniverse2010.com/event/trainingandcert.html#4) and takes place Monday afternoon from 1pm to 5pm.

- The second is called “HP Service Manager advanced tailoring concepts and best practices” (https://www.hpsoftwareuniverse2010.com/event/trainingandcert.html#5) and takes place Tuesday morning 8am – 12pm.

2) HP Roundtable session on Service Management (https://www.hpsoftwareuniverse2010.com/event/roundtables.html#6)

3) Track Sessions – HP Service Manager falls under the umbrellas of both “HP Lifecycle Management” (https://www.hpsoftwareuniverse2010.com/event/tracks.html#2) and “Pragmatic IT Service Management” (https://www.hpsoftwareuniverse2010.com/event/tracks.html#15)

Aside from HP Universe there are several other Vivit events coming up with a focus on Service Manager:

1) The Chicago chapter is hosting an ITSM User Group (https://www.vivit-worldwide.org/chapters.cfm?id=122&action=event&chapterid=4&chaptereventid=538), taking place at the DoubleTree, Downers Grove, IL, on 10th March from 10am – 3pm

2) The Colorado chapter’s winter meeting (https://www.vivit-worldwide.org/chapters.cfm?id=122&action=event&chapterid=117&chaptereventid=536) includes sessions on HP’s ITSM roadmap for 2010 and reducing the cost and improving service levels of your help desk. The meeting takes place on March 5th, from 9am to 3pm at Denver Water on 12th Avenue in Denver.

3) The Greater Toronto chapter’s 8th Vivit GTA meeting on 9th March (8:30am to 12pm at HP Canada in Mississauga) will include a presentation by Robert Lee of Achievo on migrating to SM7, and a session on responding more quickly to incidents, by HP’s John Moore.

In other news:

1) Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for the IT Service Desk report (https://h10078.www1.hp.com/cda/hpms/display/main/hpms_content.jsp?zn=bto&cp=1-11-85^12473_4000_100__) pits Service Manager against its competitors

2) HP has released a new video focusing on ITSM: http://h30423.www3.hp.com/index.jsp?fr_story=6d59bb1b1c901defc095321a2717b0b9a87189d6&rf=bm

Other resources:

The HP Service Management SIG pages on the Vivit site (http://www.vivit-worldwide.org/chapters.cfm?id=122&action=content&contentid=1094&chapterid=186) includes a list of forums (or fora for those of you who had the benefit of a classical education) where you can discuss, ask and answer anything about HP Service Manager.

See you at HP Universe 2010!

Floris

This is not a test (OK, it is really)

September 22nd, 2009

testdriveWell, we’ve been talking about it publicly for some time, and we’ve been working on it for what seems like an eternity, but we’ve finally found a way to let potential customers, partners and resellers see what SMI Suite is really all about.

Ladies and gentlemen: I give you the SMI Suite TestDrive.

We’ve always struggled because SMI Suite is not an application that can be demoed like most desktop apps. Offering a trial version download is simply not a realistic option because the magic of SMI Suite is all in the implementation – it’s how it connects to your SM7 database, how the mapping to the reporting database works, how the universes interact with the reporting DB and so forth.

So when people ask to see a trial version we’ve only been able to offer a webinar session to show them how it works, when what they really want to do is get their hands dirty and have a play. Which is perfectly understandable, and precisely why we’ve worked so hard on getting TestDrive online.

So what is TestDrive and (perhaps more importantly) what isn’t it?

Well, TestDrive is a hosted implementation of SMI Suite, using a generic sample database, and accessible through Business Objects Infoview, which is a lightweight web client. We’ve opened up access to the Incident universe, so you can use the BO Web Intelligence web app to create your own report based on any of the Incident Management data, and save a pdf copy to your local machine.

For mainly technical reasons this is a massively scaled down version of what you get with the full version of SMI Suite. In the full version you get not one but five universes (Incident, plus Change, Configuration, Interaction and Problem) and you get the full range of BO XI front-end capabilities, which includes more functionality for creating, viewing, refreshing, scheduling and publishing of reports than we offer in the TestDrive. And, for reasons that I hope are obvious, the TestDrive will not return any data from your SM7 implementation in the way that the full version of SMI Suite does.

Despite these caveats, the SMI Suite TestDrive is a great way to check out how powerful reporting can be with SMI Suite and how easy it can be to pull key data from SM7 and get real insight into performance, workload, patterns and other interesting and useful stuff.

Again, Why is Westbury unique?

September 9th, 2009

I can’t help myself for writing a more marketing/salesy kind of blog today. The reason is that I’m constantly looking for that golden egg that explains the uniqueness of Westbury SMI Suite. One of the answers is: Westbury SMI Suite solved all the data warehouse issues for HP Service Manager/Center of maintaining the environment.

Let me give you an example.

One of our customers has developed a complete data warehouse solution specifically for HP Service Management. With this solution they solved all the nasty database / data model issues of Service Manager and even made the data warehouse relational. However, they are still interested in Westbury’s SMI suite.

Why?

Because maintaining this ever changing data warehouse environment is extremely expensive for them. Individual experts like database engineers (to modify the database), BI developers (to modify the Universes or Cubes) and ETL specialists to modify and develop the ETL layer are all required for making Service Manager fields/objects available for reporting.

With Westbury SMI foundation, reports are created from data stored in the dedicated SMI Database, whose structure is fixed. This enables Westbury to offer a standardized reporting environment, regardless of the (changing) structure of the back-end HP ServiceCenter software / HP Service Manager software database. SMI Foundation has been created in such a way that administrators can maintain the solution through a GUI, hence there is no need for any programming.

Again, I apologize for being so salesy in this blog, but it is so important for me to make sure that people understand the uniqueness of our solution. If Service Center and Service Manager customer really grasp our architecture, they will see that there is no solution like it available in the market.

Floris

How to…

August 27th, 2009

“How to…” is quite a generic title for a post so no doubt you will fill in the blanks yourself. And think of something nice… only for me to disappoint you, because the “How to…”  I’m focusing on is… “How to build a good report”.

The first thing you need to keep in mind is that building a report is not that hard… and actually the definition of a report is the hardest part.  So to create a report – instead of just starting to build – you first need to think about a few important steps.

  1. Determine what information you need and who needs it
  2. Start building the report with selecting the data
  3. Manipulate the data (add calculations or other parameters)
  4. Create a final layout and broadcast it to your audience

The most important one of these is the first one, because based on the answer the following can be assessed. To determine which information you need you must think at several sub questions like:

  • What is the exact goal of the report, is it a simple overview,  detailed overview with calculations, or an in-depth view of performance per, let’s say, assignment group;
  • Number of Incidents per Assignment Group, Category and Priority
  • Who needs the information (management, a customer or is it for someone with in depth knowledge);
  • Management
  • How do they expect to receive the report (report with refresh possibility, PDF, Excel or HTML)
  • Report
  • How often should the report be broadcast (once, every day, weekly)
  • Every Monday morning at 8:00 am

Based on those answers you can start determining the source for you data, the answer on question 2. When you are using SMI Suite, and yeah you should,  the data will be available through several complete universes. Right now I’m taking the Incident process as an example so we need to select the Incident universe to get the data.

Once you’ve selected the objects you want to report on, that’s it… Business Objects will provide you with a default report with a tabular overview of the selected data.

tabularview

Then the last part kicks in, time to create some calculations like averages, sums, counts or percentages, and maybe create some variables that represent data in a more “jip en janneke taal” [Ed: this Dutch idiom translates to "in layman's terms", but it's cute so I didn't want to edit it out entirely]. I will add an percentage of the total number per category and priority shown per Assignment group.

Finally create the final layout and it can look like this. Because it is for the management I have decided to give exceptional high percentages a red color and “in the danger” percentages an orange color. In this case they can see at a glance the status and the possible issues.

fixed-view

Finally you can set up a scheduler, part of Business Objects, and publish the report in the desired format.

If you don’t think a report over and start building without thinking you will see that a lot of work is lost in adjusting everything.  So keep this list to guide you through the process or if you have a better guide please share!

In the next blog I will CHANGE the subject! You’re a real Sherlock if you know the subject, so surprise me!

Richard