When the analysts aren’t happy, no one is happy. That’s because these days, practically every aspect of the business is driven by insights. And because information architectures are increasingly complex, any number of issues can cause a slowdown in queries, or even basic reporting. How can your organization ensure that all systems are go? Register for this episode of The Briefing Room to learn from veteran Analyst Dr. Robin Bloor as he explains the common roadblocks to successful BI and analytics. He'll be briefed by Stan Geiger of IDERA, who previously demonstrated how his company’s SQL BI Manager can optimize platform health and performance. In this episode, he will dive deeper into how IDERA’s solution resolves resource constraints, user activity and capacity issues, making tiresome troubleshooting a thing of the past.

1. Grab some
coffee and
enjoy the
pre-show
banter
before the
top of the
hour! !

2. The Briefing Room
Past the Platform: Eliminating BI Bottlenecks

3. Welcome
Host:
Eric Kavanagh
eric.kavanagh@bloorgroup.com
@eric_kavanagh

4. u Reveal the essential characteristics of enterprise
software, good and bad
u Provide a forum for detailed analysis of today s innovative
technologies
u Give vendors a chance to explain their product to savvy
analysts
u Allow audience members to pose serious questions…and
get answers!
Mission

5. Topics
January: ANALYTICS
February: BIG DATA
March: CLOUD

6. Happy Workers = Busy Workers
u Speed matters
u Speed will always
matter
u Bottlenecks
undermine analysis
u Languishing issues
damage culture
u Speed always
matters!

7. Analyst
Robin Bloor is
Chief Analyst at
The Bloor Group
robin.bloor@bloorgroup.com
@robinbloor

8. IDERA
u IDERA offers a wide variety of database management
and development solutions
u Its products focus on performance monitoring and
workload analysis
u IDERA’s SQL BI Manager delivers comprehensive
monitoring and reporting over the BI environment

9. Guest
Stan Geiger is
Senior Product Manager
for BI at
IDERA

10. © 2016 IDERA, Inc. All rights reserved.
Proprietary and confidential.
PAST THE PLATFORM:
ENABLING FLUID ANALYSIS
Monitoring the Microsoft BI Stack

11. 11© 2016 IDERA, Inc. All rights reserved. Proprietary and confidential.
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE ARCHITECTURE

12. 12© 2016 IDERA, Inc. All rights reserved. Proprietary and confidential.
MICROSOFT PLATFORM ARCHITECTURE
§ Source Data
• Relational Databases (SQL Server, Oracle, etc.)
• NoSQL (MongoDB, Cassandra, Hbase)
§ Data Storage and Aggregation
• SQL Server Database
• Azure Data Warehouse
• Analysis Services (SSAS)
§ Presentation/Analytics
• Excel
• Reporting Services (SSRS)
• PowerBI

13. “
13© 2015 IDERA, Inc. All rights reserved. Proprietary and confidential.
You don’t know what you don’t
know.
Noam Chomsky

14. 14© 2016 IDERA, Inc. All rights reserved. Proprietary and confidential.
PLATFORM MONITORING
§ Availability
• Resource Availability (up/down)
• Root Cause Identification
§ Performance
• Server level performance metrics
• Resource level performance
• Identify bottlenecks
§ Utilization
• User Sessions
• Requests (queries, reports, etc.)

15. “
15© 2015 IDERA, Inc. All rights reserved. Proprietary and confidential.
When you need it, and don't have
it... you sing a different tune.
Bert Gummer, Tremors 2

16. 16© 2016 IDERA, Inc. All rights reserved. Proprietary and confidential.
AVAILABILITY AND PERFORMANCE
§ Is the platform available?
• Is the platform accepting requests?
§ Is the platform performing under acceptable parameters?
• Performance Bottlenecks
• Resource Bottlenecks
• Application Contention
§ ETL Status and Performance
• Did the ETL process complete?
− Where did it fail?
− Why did it fail?
• Did the ETL process perform under acceptable parameters?

17. 17© 2016 IDERA, Inc. All rights reserved. Proprietary and confidential.
BI ACTIVITY
§ Users connected
§ User activity
• Queries and requests
• Tasks being processed
• Reports executing
§ Utilization
• Most active Reports
• Object utilization

18. 18© 2016 IDERA, Inc. All rights reserved. Proprietary and confidential.
Examples

19. 19© 2016 IDERA, Inc. All rights reserved. Proprietary and confidential.
THANKS!
Any questions?
You can find me at:
stan.geiger@idera.com

20. Perceptions & Questions
Analyst:
Robin Bloor

21. BI Bottlenecks
Robin Bloor, PhD

22. The Role of BI
BI is the feedback loop for corporate
systems

23. The Driving Force: Insight = Analytics
And Optimization?

24. The Begetting of BI
Desire for knowledge begets user requests
User requests beget analytics projects
Analytics projects beget data lakes
Data lakes + analytics beget insights
Insights beget BI

25. A Full BI Platform (Simplified)

26. Corporate Reality

27. Disruptive Dynamics
u Data volumes
u Data sources
u Streaming & speed of arrival
u Unstructured data
u Social (unclean) data
u Data provenance
u Compute power (parallelism)
u Machine learning
u New analytic workloads
Bi is not a static situation.

28. Potential Bottlenecks
u Availability (of all components)
u Data flow integration/automation
u Resource bottlenecks (The Iron)
u Ingest issues
u Database performance (CPU/Memory/
Disk)
u Contention for data
The issues in summary:

29. About BI Monitoring…
Unless the BI SERVICE is dependable
and timely it isn’t a SERVICE

30. u Does your software tend to influence how BI is
deployed (or is it already too late in most cases as
you enter after it is already set up)?
u How long does it usually take to bring a BI
implementation under control?
u What are the typical bottlenecks you encounter?
What are the most common mistakes people
make?
u Do you cater for streaming BI/analytics? If so how
big is the demand for this?

31. u How many of your customers (roughly) are
building predictive analytics apps?
u Do you tend to be deployed in very large BI
implementations? What are the largest
configurations you encounter, both in terms of
data and in terms of variety of BI applications?
u Which companies/technologies do you compete
with directly?

33. Upcoming Topics
www.insideanalysis.com
January: ANALYTICS
February: BIG DATA
March: CLOUD

34. THANK YOU
for your
ATTENTION!
Some images provided courtesy of Wikimedia Commons