Demolition Derby, Part 3: Dear SAP Claus

In this, the final installment of my Demolition Derby series, I’d like to discuss my wishlist for the Monitoring application in the upcoming SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence 4.1 release (BI 4.1).

I realize that the features in BI 4.1 are likely already decided, but this is called a “Wish List” for good reason.

1. A .unx universe (or at least a Data Foundation) to start building from. This should include both Monitoring and the Auditing Data Store, and allow the user to more easily combine and compare Caution and Danger alerts (from ADS) with trends (from the Monitoring Tables). We should be able to easily correlate errors with specific users or servers (or services) within the platform.
2. The elimination of Derby from the Monitoring application altogether. As of now, there is no real clear understanding on how Derby works (or doesn’t) in a clustered environment. Why not just set up Monitoring into the ADS at installation time? Or at least give the Administrator the choice during the setup routine.
3. Metrics that directly correlate to settings inside of the various platform servers. If my Web Intelligence Processing Server has a setting “Maximum Simultaneous Connections”, I would expect to see a metric in the monitoring app called “Simultaneous Connections”, or even a pre-built watch to keep an eye on that value.
4. “Self-setting” watch lists. From my previous example, it would be stellar if I had a pre-built watch for the Web Intelligence Simultaneous Connections that would automatically adjust itself every time I change the “Maximum Simultaneous Connections” setting on the server. There should be one of these for at least 2 or 3 critical settings on each server in the platform that should set themselves up based on the configuration values I set as an administrator.

I do realize these are some pretty lofty goals. If you can think of some more, or better ones, I invite you to comment below.

Monitoring in SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence 4.0 is great. Really great. I think with a little TLC, it can be phenomenal. I’ll drink to phenomenal.