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
Services
Including a service essentially provides you a shortcut to reporting on all the dictionaries in a service
without having to know identify those dictionaries individually (that is, as separate dimensions/query
subjects.) This is especially useful for users particularly interested in one service only, or who are
infrequent users of the query tools and need a quick-and-dirty way to report on items of interest.
Making services reportable has the following drawbacks, which may mitigate against having dimensions
derived from services in your data mart:
• If the service contains two fields with the same name (from different dictionaries) they appear as
Dictionary1_FieldName and Dictionary2_FieldName in the query subject based on the service.
Fields which are not ambiguously named simply have the field name.
• Some services contain so many dictionaries, with so many fields, that the service-dimension
configuration must be greatly adjusted from the default number of fields allowed. Typically, this
means increasing the number of character, date, or numeric fields to be the highest number required
for any one service to be made reportable. SQLServer documentation warns that this may adversely
affect performance, because it would entail “row chaining”.
Configuring the Data Mart
The Service Catalog data mart can be installed without any customization. However, this “least common
denominator” approach is unlikely to meet the reporting requirements of most sites. Therefore, the
recommended procedure is to review the best practices presented above, in conjunction with the site's
dictionary and service configuration. Using the following section as a worksheet, analysts can determine
the desired data mart configuration for their site. These configuration parameters can then be used to
configure Advanced Reporting.
These parameters correspond to many of the properties that must be specified when the data mart is
installed. For a detailed explanation of the installation and configuration parameters used to configure
the data mart and customize its installation please see the Cisco Prime Service Catalog Installation
Guide.
Number of Dictionary and Service Tables
When you create the data mart, you specify the maximum number of dictionary and service dimensions
the data mart will contain. Each of these dimensions will correspond to a separate table in the data mart.
The number of dictionaries or services can be increased after the data mart has been installed. However,
to avoid this step, be sure to create the data mart with enough tables to accommodate current
requirements and enhancements that are planned for imminent deployment.
There is no “magic bullet” for determining how many tables of each type need to be created. Some
guidelines are given in the previous section. Service designers need to review all dictionaries, determine
which ones they want to include in the Data Mart, and designate those as Reportable by choosing Yes in
the Reportable drop-down menu in the Service Designer > Dictionaries component.
Service Catalog tracks the number of service and dictionary tables which have been designated as
Reportable and created in the data mart, so that the specified number is not exceeded. If you
subsequently decide that a dictionary (or service) should not be reportable, you may change the
corresponding Reportable field to No. This removes the source dictionary or service from the ETL job