SAP Business Objects 4.1 Audit Dashboard

Amidst of all the amazing data visualization tools available out in the market, I'm writing this post to show what wonders you can do by leveraging Web Intelligence tool from SAP Business Intelligence 4.1 product suite. My idea for this post is not to compare it with any of the Data Viz. tools but just to share something useful for the organizations which are using Business Objects as their main reporting tool.

I have seen Business Objects evolving as a rich product; versions after versions from the ages of BO 6.5 and with the complete hands-on experience on all the versions since then, I feel BO 4.1 is very stable and a mature product of its own race. In order to effectively manage an enterprise product for a global user base, one needs to ensure its availability to the users and should be aware of the platform issues they might encounter in advance.  Out of several methods of system monitoring, I'm sharing a practice that I'd implemented using BO audit universe.

Since version 4.0 there is no direct support from SAP for this universe, perhaps they burnt their fingers due to the poor design on the audit schema in 3x. Nevertheless, it works great in the current(4.1) version and with a brief understanding of the  underlying tables you can write efficient queries unlike the prior versions.

What metrics can I get using BO Audit Universe? 

As an Administrator, you'd like to know about how many users are using the product on daily basis? what components do they access? How many jobs fail each day? what are the long running jobs? etc.

Though, all the above questions can be answered by writing reports on the audit universe, I've collected some key metrics in a daily dashboard that helps in keeping the enterprise clean and error free. The data providers/ queries can be downloaded from my GitHub repository and using some simple report level calculations you can generate the following metrics.

Sessions Per Hour 

To know what are the peak hours of reporting during the day using the userLoginAudit query  get the count  of sessions as a measure and plot it against the "Event Hour" dimension.

Total user logins by Status

Now that you have the sessions per hour, use the same query to  get the 'Total # of logins' measure by doing a count on Event ID (primary key of the table) and plot a pie chart along with "Event Status" dimension

Reports Run Per Hour

We know what is the busiest hour in the day, but having the number of reports scheduled/ refreshed in a given hour gives us the volume of work done. Get the two measures by doing a count on "Event ID" from the query  reportRefreshAuditQuery where "Event type" is Refresh and Run respectively.

Total Scheduled reports by Status
Along with the per hour statistics of scheduled instances, an overall measure of total failures helps in alerting the viewer of the job server issues. Normally, a failure like this(with reference to the chart) can be considered as user errors and can be corrected by educating the user about the correct way of creating a schedule. To generate this chart, take the "# of scheduled reports" measure from the previous chart and plot it against the "Event Status" dimension

Average vs Max Report refresh time
Though majority of your reports should run in less than 5-10 mins, it is good to keep an eye on the outliers as it will help you in identifying the long running report of the day as well as the user who ran it with further drill down.  Since we do not need all the data points here, getting the max and avg run time per hour will show us the outliers as well as the normal trend when plotted against the "Event Hour" dimensions in a dual axis chart

Most Active users of the Day

Last but not the least, after learning about how your reports are doing, it is a treat to know who is actually running them most. With BO 4.1 there's a new chart type 'Tag Cloud' which gives a better visualization for Top N users based on the count of "Event ID" measure.

PS: The user names here are masked due to privacy policy.

This concludes all the major areas which can be audited in Business Objects Enterprise within a single report and a daily EOD instance can help in monitoring the enterprise effectively in a global customer base environment.