Solution Spotlight - APOS Insight

For BI practitioners, deep system knowledge is the start of the incredibly rewarding journey to well managed BI. APOS Insight illuminates that path through enhanced metadata management, comprehensive audit, proactive system monitoring and alerts, and full impact analysis.

You need these capabilities to form an accurate understanding of your BI system's performance, and to plan for its future. APOS Insight will help you:

• Improve system governanceOptimize BI system performance; meet and exceed service agreements.
• Meet compliance and audit objectivesEnable your BI team to meet corporate governance, audit and regulatory requirements.
• Prepare for migration & upgradesCatalog your content; extract pre-migration benchmark information; map IDs between systems; compare security structures between environments; plan your migration.
• Audit and harden system securityAudit security and perform remedial fixes before the underlying problems hurt you.
• Protect sensitive informationKnow who has accessed what information through off-line historical analysis of audit data. The APOS Insight Website Auditor also provides granular user session data for the web application server and SAP BusinessObjects.
• Enhance change management processesSee what has changed, and who made the changes, so that your change management processes are audit-ready.

Use APOS Insight to optimize your SAP BI environment and infrastructure, establish complete confidence in your content, enable industry-specific regulatory compliance, and to deliver well managed BI to your organization.

Learn more about APOS Insight and Deep System Knowledge

New: Xcelsius Activity Logging with APOS Insight

APOS Insight for SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1 and BI 4.x now has Xcelsius Activity Logging capabilities.

We've been hearing for some time from platform managers and dashboard designers that they need better ways to understand how their dashboards are being used so that they can improve their dashboards, and thus improve service to their users. As a result, we've added Xcelsius Activity Logging capabilities to APOS Insight.

While native Xcelsius logging (i.e., basic information such as who opened a dashboard and how long they used it) may be adequate for normal day-to-day operations, organizations that want to be proactive in their development and evolution of dashboards need more information. APOS Insight lets you ask much more specific questions about how your dashboards are being used.

The APOS Insight Xcelsius Activity Logging feature uses an add-on to Xcelsius (or Dashboards 4) to configure real-time logging of Xcelsius user activity to the Insight database. To configure logging, you bind the APOS logging control to cells in the spreadsheet that represent property name and value pairs. When a value changes it is logged to the database.

For example, if you want to know which tabs dashboard users are viewing or not viewing, you could bind the APOS Xcelsius Logging control to cells that control tab visibility. Using this and similar types of information for a group of users, developers, administrators and managers can judge how a dashboard is being used, and thus how effective the design of the dashboard is.

APOS Insight Lite - BusinessObjects System Metrics

Are you an SAP BusinessObjects platform manager or administrator being asked to do more with less? Do you need a clear inventory of the objects, schedules and instances in your deployment? Do you want to know which objects in your deployment are most frequently used? Most rarely used? Would the ability to analyze and compare report processing windows help you optimize your system?

APOS Insight Lite can help you deal with these questions and more.

APOS Insight Lite is a subset of the services found in the APOS Insight Advanced Solution, a full-featured system metrics, performance analytics, and system planning solution for SAP Business Objects.

Find out more about APOS Insight Lite BusinessObjects system metrics.

The Big Data Challenge

 

Why are companies such as HP, IBM and Oracle spending big money to acquire big data capabilities? Michael Vizard's Slashdot article, "The Multi-Billion-Dollar Data Management Challenge,"shows how serious the quest for Big Data supremacy has become. (Thanks to Jim Harris (@ocdqblog) for passing this along via Twitter.)

As of 2012, the world creates approximately 2.5 quintillion (2.5 x 10¹⁸) bytes of data daily (Wikipedia). The mathematical notation in parentheses is not not redundant, because the definition of "quintillion" varies according to which side of the Atlantic you are standing on. In the US and Canada, a quintillion has 18 zeroes; in the UK, France and Germany, a quintillion has 30 zeroes. That's just a simple example of the difficulty involved in dealing with Big Data.

Volume, variety, velocity and veracity are the four "Vs" of Big Data, but there's one "M" we should mention as well: metadata. Metadata is the key to managing and indexing the massive inflow of data, making accurate operational and competitive intelligence available in a timely manner to your decision makers.

For SAP BusinessObjects platform managers, now is the time to get your own metadata house in order. APOS Insight's enhanced audit and metadata management capabilities can help.

Product Pipeline: APOS Insight

Announcements from the APOS Development team on new APOS Insight features:

• The KPI "Report Extended Info" service now logs all tables accessed by reports to a separate table in the database, so that you can analyze table usage in relation to reports.
• KPI now caches passwords to access report SQL statements when offline.
• KPI now sends email notifications when KPI scans are complete.
• RealTime Monitor for SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1 now supports IBM DB2.

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