| Alright, it's time for a PerformancePoint point post, specifically, one aimed at the System Administrator who wished to monitor their network. A common misconception is that BI is for the CEO, CFO or other C-level executives who wish to see that status of the company in terms of dollars, budgets, sales, etc. However, a co-worker and I decided we needed to start designing a BI Solution for the IT worker who wants to monitor and analyze the details of his servers. Our solution is still in development and tweaking, but here is the beginning to our Server Cube and BI solution. A segment of our KPI list can be seen here:
The KPI list is generated from WMI queries that are then linked to a cube. Continued work is being done to gather even more relevant information from the queries to get a better view of your server status. This cube could also be custom developed if anyone had specific information they wanted in the cube, both from WMI queries as well as any other information from various sources. Once we have our cube and our KPIs, we linked them to our server "Strategy Map" seen below. We created our rack layout, created in Visio and linked the Server shapes to the KPIs for the various servers. As you can see we are still working on it as we cross domains and from our domain into the DMZ to monitor those servers.
So, as you can see, the PerformancePoint BI tool has many uses and isn't contained to just the financial data that people tend to automatically associate with BI. I'll continue to keep you all updated on the status of this project as we continue to improve it in our free time. Feel free to leave any comments on suggestions for improvement or any other ideas you may have. |