Technical References

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Cisco Prime Service Catalog 10.0 Reporting Guide
OL-31037-01
Chapter 1 Advanced Reporting Data Mart
Reporting Architecture and Components
Reporting Architecture and Components
Overview
This section describes the architecture of the Service Catalog reporting solution. It can be read by anyone
curious about how the Cognos components are used and the role each plays in the solution. It can safely
be skipped by those interested primarily in how to use the Service Catalog reporting solution to run the
prebuilt reports supplied in the Standard Package or in generating their own ad-hoc reports or queries.
Data Mart Architecture
In general, it is not “best practice” to allow users to run reports in the same environment in which a
transactional system such as Service Catalog is operating. The resource requirements for running
reports, ad-hoc queries, and other in-depth analyses are vastly different from resource requirements for
running a transactional system that responds acceptably to online users. Therefore, data that forms the
basis for reports and in-depth analyses is typically extracted from the transactional system and loaded
into an environment dedicated and optimized for reporting.
The Service Catalog dedicated reporting environment consists of two “packages,” whose contents and
usage are explained in detail in the rest of this chapter.
Standard Reports Data Package
The Standard Reports Package supports the prebuilt reports and KPIs. A variety of output options
provide information on task-, service-, and requisition-based measures and trends. In addition, reports
on the structure of the Service Catalog data, including persons, organizations, service teams, and service
groups, are available. All data used in the prebuilt reports is also available in the Custom Reports
package. Over time this package is merged with the Custom Reports package.
Custom Reports Data Package
The Custom Reports Data Package provides a “dimensional” model which allows ad-hoc reports on task,
service and requisition-related data. In addition to the measures and attributes available in the Standard
Reports package, data entered by users into the customized service forms configured at each site is
available. This “form data reporting” (FDR) provides visibility into all attributes of all dictionaries and
services which the service designers have designated as “Reportable”.
Refreshing the Data Mart
The data mart must be loaded with data from the transactional systems on a regular basis in an
Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) process. That is, data is extracted from the transactional system;
transformed into a format that is optimized for reporting (rather than for online transactions); and then
loaded into the data mart.