1. The premiere software and product delivery event.
June 6–10 Orlando, Florida
Best Practices & Lessons
Learned on Our Insight
Deployment
Rational Unleash The Labs
June 7th, 2010
Rick Weaver, Director, Unleash The Labs
Marc Nehme, Rational Specialist, Unleash The Labs

2. Unleash The Labs - Who We Are
 Central point of contact within the Rational Development
organization
 Situations: pre-sales, post-sales, PoC, PoT,
implementations, demonstrations, Product Management
requests
 Improve communications and alignment
between Rational Development and the
Rational field
 Manage customer interactions,
engagements, opportunities
 Engage appropriate teams to ensure
customer success

3. Our Objectives
 Improve ROI by moving to an automated
reporting process
 Improve visibility across our organization –
Identify high priority objectives
 Have a central location where metrics are
accessible
 Create ”On-Demand” & Trend reports
 Create multiple views/levels of our reports
 Drink our own champagne, Tell our story,
Demonstrate success with Rational Insight

4. Reporting Challenges
 Organizational unity & process
 Various data sources
 Disparate data sources
 Individual product (distinct) reporting solutions
 Lack of functionality/express
 Training & resources
 Manual data manipulation
 Overall manual process
 Effort/time required
Manual
Data
Project
Data
Headcount
&
Financials
Rational
TeamConcert
Rational
Quality
Manager
Rational
ClearQuest

5. Rational Insight’s Value
BEFORE
AFTER
CQ
CQ
DW & Report Server
Staff
Organization Portal Data Source 1) Export Data
2) Massage data & Create reports
3) Create presentation slides
4) Create email to stakeholders
Stakeholders
Organization Portal Data Source Stakeholders
“On-Demand”
Access
Insight Portal
Automated
Integration
Staff focuses
on other tasks

6. Our Results - Live Dashboards

7. Our Results - Trend Dashboards

8. Our Results – Other Metrics

9.  Moved from an 80% manual reporting process to an 80%
automated reporting process
 Migrated ALL of our major reports to IBM Rational Insight
 Saved about 40 work hours per month
 Saved IBM $$$
“Through the automation and dashboard capabilities in Insight, our
team is saving about 40 hours a month on our reporting activities.
Wealso can offer new capabilities such as “on-demand”
dashboards which would have been very labor intensive to do
without Insight”
Rick Weaver, Program Director of “IBM Rational Unleash the Labs”
Since leveraging IBM Rational Insight for our reporting processes,
we have:
Our Organization’s Savings

11. Phased Approach to Success
Crawl Walk Run
 Focus on key/core requirements and set a goal to
achieve those objectives
 With the future picture in mind, create a
foundational structure for your business
 Requirements may not all be created before
deployment - Your first results will spawn new
requirements
 Start with one data source, one business area, one
set of reports

12. Phased Approach to Success
Crawl Walk Run
 For initial deployment and enablement, start with
the simplest use case reporting - Run through Live
data reporting process (XDC, FM, QS)
 Data Warehouse – ODS (DM, RS)
 Data Warehouse – Data marts
 The MCIF approach is a systematic iterative
approach for measurably improving capability,
aligned with business goals and objectives

13. Best Practices / Lessons Learned
Insight improves data capturing
 Insight will highlight high-level analytics, but
also drill down to lower level detail
 This will show how well your organization is
following your data capturing process
 Be prepared to make some tweaks to the
source data schemas and process to
accommodate for certain data achievements
in Insight
 Source data needs to be accurate as
inaccurate or incomplete data can disrupt the
Insight reports
 Misleading data, empty reports, etc

14. Best Practices / Lessons Learned
Insight Deployment Management
 Identify atleast two people to own/manage the
deployment
 Developer role – Back end work: product
integration, data extraction, data
transformation, Data Warehouse loading,
Data modeling
 Report Author – Front end work:
Dashboard/report designs, everything the end
user will see

15. Best Practices / Lessons Learned
Deployment tips
 Always stay on latest fixpack
 Maintain test environment
 Take regular backups of reports/dashboards via the
Cognos homegrown tool (Content Administration)
 Importing work into other environments is transparent
to/independent of the backend database

16. Best Practices / Lessons Learned
Deployment tips
 Keep the Data Services Server on a machine other than
the Report Server
Data Services
Server
Report Server
&
Database Server
&
Developer tools
ClearQuest
Server
Unleash The Labs Deployment Topology

17. Best Practices / Lessons Learned
Deployment tips
 Report Server/Database Server
 Dual Core Processor (2.x+ Ghz)
 4GB RAM
 Free hard disk space varies on anticipated size of Data Warehouse
(minimum 10GB)
 Data Services Server
 Dual Core Processor (2.x+ Ghz)
 4GB RAM (just CQ client & adapter installed)
 Free hard disk space: Minimum 10GB

18. Best Practices / Lessons Learned
Deployment tips
Data Services
Server
Report Server
ClearQuest
Server
Best Practice Topology
ReqPro
Server
RQM
Server
ETL
Server
Database
Server

19. Best Practices / Lessons Learned
Deployment Performance Tweaks
 Behavior: First report of the day seems to take a bit
longer to execute – the following reports seem much more
efficient
 Likely Cause: BIBusTKServerMain.exe not initialized –
the process takes time to initialize when no activity (report
server process). Two processes needed for interactive
reporting
 Solution: Increase the idleTimeLimitSec to a longer
period (default is 900 seconds) in reportservice.xml file
 <installdir>cognoswebappsp2pdWEB-INFservices

<installdir>AppServerprofilesRationalInsightinstalledApp
ssma-unleashNode01CellIBM Cognos
8.earp2pd.warWEB-INFservices

20. Best Practices / Lessons Learned
Deployment Performance Tweaks
 Behavior: Reports are hanging and never execute
 Possible Cause 1: AIO function in WAS – there are
several issues which the asynchronous input/output
transfer code might expose
 Solution 1: Disable AIO
 Renames or delete these two files: ibmaio.dll & ibmaiodbg.dll located
here: <installdir> AppServerbin

21. Best Practices / Lessons Learned
Deployment Performance Tweaks
 Behavior: Reports are hanging and never execute
 Possible Cause 2: WAS thread pool size not large
enough
 Solution 2: Increase WAS thread pool size from default
10 to 25 threads
 WAS console > Servers > Application Servers >
RationalInsightServer > Additional Properties > Thread
Pools > WebContainer
 Warning: Doing this AND disabling AIO will cause your
Insight web portal to become inaccessible

22. Best Practices / Lessons Learned
 Prior to setting up an extraction from a new data source, its
important that a person understands the basics of the data
source’s purpose, what it is capturing, and its schema, so
that you know how to structure the data
Insight Knowledge

23. Best Practices / Lessons Learned
 Where applicable, utilizing the out of the box
models is very helpful in avoiding rework
 We saved a good amount of time leveraging
the development team’s effort of creating
data models and ETL jobs
Insight Knowledge

24. Best Practices / Lessons Learned
 In Data Manager, it is good to understand the OOTB fact
builds and lookup tables and what they do – avoids alot
of rework
 Know and review the the OOTB DW tables so that when
developing, you’ll be familiar with the tables and fields
captured
Insight Knowledge

25. Best Practices / Lessons Learned
 Prior Cognos experience a plus, but not
required
 Start Query Studio – move to Report Studio
Insight Reporting
 Use the OOTB reports as
as guide and an
enablement tool
 Help Index, Google, trial &
error – face time
 Practice makes perfect !

26. Best Practices / Lessons Learned
 Start with learning formatting, filters,
and aggregates
 Move to parameter passing, prompts,
and multiple query reports
Insight Reporting – Best Practices

27. Best Practices / Lessons Learned
 Contain the number of Live reports on any given
dashboard – load times could be painful and the
servers may get overloaded at times
 Create generic drill through (target) reports that can
be linked to, from several front end reports, using
parameter passing - time saver
Insight Reporting – Best Practices

28. Best Practices / Lessons Learned
 World Map report works great for geographic
distribution of workloads & headcount and is a big
attraction to viewers
 Pie charts & bar charts with associated drill-through
reports were key for our deployment
Insight Reporting – Lessons Learned

29. Best Practices / Lessons Learned
 Conditional formatting was very
useful to identify high-priority
objectives
 Helped raise awareness with
immediate notification of critical
situations
 “Watch Rules” provide automated
notification
Insight Reporting – Lessons Learned

30. Best Practices / Lessons Learned
 Leverage the multi-product integration capability of
Insight – Adapter, REST, ODBC
 Integrating with Excel can be helpful and painless if
crucial data is stored in xls sheets and is needed to
be reported on in Insight
 Create tables in Excel sheet, integrate with Insight
via ODBC driver, business as usual
Insight Reporting – Lessons Learned

31. Best Practices / Lessons Learned
 Set aside time (account for) testing and debugging of
reports/deployment when scoping your work
 Some of the Cognos tools (Data Manager, Report
Studio, etc) have been out for years before Insight’s
release - there are a number of public resources
available to you
 Stay connected with the Insight community as most
likely there is someone out there who has faced the
challenges you may be facing
General Tips

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