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
The ETL process is “incremental”. Only the data that has been changed or created since the last time the
data mart was refreshed are processed in the next ETL cycle. Users can continue to access the data mart
and run reports while the refresh process is running. However, the response time for some reports may
be adversely affected. Running the ETL process has no or very limited impact on the response times in
the transactional database.
The refresh process is typically scheduled to run automatically at regular intervals. We recommend that
the data mart be refreshed every 24 hours, ideally at a period of limited user activity.
Details on the executables required as part of the ETL process and scheduling the process for execution
are given in the Cisco Prime Service Catalog Installation Guide. Details on the Cognos and Service
Catalog components involved in this process are given in the section of this guide in the “Data Mart
Administration” section on page 1-51.
Standard Reports Package
The Standard Reports Package consists of a set prebuilt reports and key performance indicators (KPIs)
that are supplied with Service Catalog and the database tables required to support generation of these
reporting objects. These prebuilt objects meet many business unit requirements for the reports generated
from operational data.
Database Tables
The database which supports the Standard Reports Package contains both detail tables and summary
tables.
The detail tables provide a “denormalized” view of the database. Each table provides all the data that
appears on a corresponding report. This means that running each report is optimized, so no report needs
to access related data in lookup tables. It also means, however, that these tables CANNOT be combined
in a report with other tables, since there are no relationships between the tables: each table is a complete,
denormalized view of one type of fact about the OLTP system, to the specified level of detail. Further,
no drill-up or drill-down, to different levels of detail, is possible.
The summary tables contain aggregated or summarized data. Presummarizing data eliminates processing
delays that would otherwise occur if summary reports needed to aggregate data in real-time, in response
to a report request. As for the detail tables, each summary table should be used only for its dedicated
reports or KPIs—no summary tables can be joined to other tables to support ad-hoc reporting
requirements.
Prebuilt Reports
The prebuilt reports that are included in the Standard Reports Package are created using the Report
Studio tool and included in the Reporting module. The default report display format is set to HTML; but
this delivery format, as well as other runtime parameters, can be modified when the reports are run. If
the reporting solution includes Report Designer, users are able to view the definitions of the prebuilt
reports and, if desired, modify the definition or create new reports to better meet corporate requirements.
Service KPIs
The service Key Performance Indicators are generated using JFreechart API’s (JFreechart is not part of
the Cognos product suite, but is open source software). The charts are generated on demand, by reading
from the summary data tables created for each KPI.