Technical References

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Cisco Prime Service Catalog 10.0 Reporting Guide
OL-31037-01
Chapter 1 Advanced Reporting Data Mart
Best Practices for Service Design and Reporting
• Deleted fields will remain in the corresponding query subject in the data mart. Field values are blank
for any requests submitted after the date the field was deleted.
• You can freely change the length assigned to any field.
• You cannot change the data type assigned to any field. This will cause the ETL process that loads
the data mart to fail. If this must absolutely be done, you will need to recreate the form data
component of the data mart and reload all data. Procedures for doing so are available from the Cisco
Technical Assistance Center (TAC).
Services
Making a service “reportable” means that the service appears as a query subject in the ServiceData
folder. The service record consists of all reportable dictionaries in the service. Any fields exceeding the
limits on the number of each type of field (character, date, number) are excluded from the data mart. The
names of the data mart query objects are derived from the field labels as specified when the form for the
service is designed. When a reportable service includes two fields with identical labels, the ETL process
adds the dictionary fields to the data mart with query item names of Dictionary_Label_1,
Dictionary_Label_2, and so on.
A service bundle can be designated as reportable. Making a service bundle reportable means that service
bundle appears as a query subject in the ServiceData folder. The service bundle record consists of all
dictionaries which were associated to the child services as well as the service bundle itself.
If the child services which were attached to the service bundle are also reportable, the child services
record consists of the dictionaries which were associated with the respective child services.
In addition to the guidelines for reportable dictionaries, follow these guidelines when constructing
services to be reportable:
• Do not assign two fields in different dictionaries in the same service the same label. Since labels are
used to name the corresponding query items in the data mart, the labels for fields used in the same
service should be unique.
Choosing Objects to Make Reportable
Since each customer site will obviously have a different set of dictionaries and services, there can be no
hard-and-fast rules as to how to decide which of these to make reportable. However, the following
guidelines may help you decide which objects to include in the data mart.
Dictionaries
Dictionaries with dates or numbers in them might be good candidates for inclusion in the data mart.
Dictionaries consisting wholly or partly or very large text fields, designed to hold descriptions or
explanations, are not good candidates for inclusion; such fields would be truncated at the maximum
character size specified when the data mart is built.
Dictionaries deemed critical to the business need to be included. This would typically include the
Customer and Initiator dictionaries since they include information that is not in the corresponding
person-based dimensions or is more current than the information that was in Organization Designer.