Essent InSite for Business Intelligence
Essent® InSite® for Business Intelligence builds upon industry-leading Business Intelligence Solutions. Essent InSite for BI leverages the flexible, scalable, and relational InSite Data Schema against advanced data modeling tools for business intelligence to create a single repository of canned reports and ad hoc queries that span technologies, vendors, and software versions. Essent InSite for BI not only puts hundreds of professionally formatted, efficiently-designed canned reports right at the users fingertips, but it empowers the users with ad hoc queries, private and publicly saved queries, private and public report creation, and private and public report template design. The Essent InSite Data Schema uses warehousing technologies to pre-calculate formulas, aggregate summary information, and save snapshots of busy-hour data, giving users quick and efficient access to large summaries of data through both canned reports and ad hoc queries. Advanced dash boarding and score carding technologies coupled with National, Regional, and Market-level canned reports give executives and managers quick access to high-level views of network performance.
The Essent InSite Data Schema is built to support data types from multiple technologies and vendors. It supports a number of data duration types, for example, sub-hourly, hourly, and daily durations. The Essent InSite Data Schema models Network Topology in a logical and efficient manor, enabling report aggregation to multiple levels that include both Network Element levels, such as rolling sector level data up to an MSC or a BSC, as-well-as geographic levels, such as data aggregated to a Market or Region level.
The Business Intelligence layer abstracts the low-level details of a relational database from the user, but still allows the user to query low-level detailed information, such as raw peg counters. The advanced modeling functionality at this layer gives the user the ability to take dissimilar data from different data sources and present it side-by-side, without the need to understand the complexities of how the data relates.
For example, the calculation for Network traffic pulled from vendor A’s device may be calculated differently than from vender B, making it somewhat tedious and potentially difficult to view the total traffic from Vendor A’s device alongside the total traffic from Vendor B’s device on the same report. With Essent InSite for BI, a user can add a Device field and Traffic field to a report and the BI layer will determine how to calculate the formula, the user is simply returned a report with the total traffic for each device, in line on one report, regardless of the vendor, or even the software version, of the device. The system provides an intelligent, accurate, homogenized view of the network by harmonizing heterogeneous data and formulas -- protecting the user from the complexities of incongruous data and data sources, while providing the user with the intuitive ability to produce unified views of the data.
Essent InSite for BI can contain hundreds of professionally formatted canned reports that can be used as-is or modified by authorized users. Ad hoc queries, modified reports, and entirely new reports can be developed and published, cutting development costs and vendor dependencies. Report authoring allows authorized users to create sophisticated cross-tab reports, graphs, charts, and customize the formatting.
Canned reports can be filtered by topology, date, time, day of the week, date range, and time range. Canned reports also support Equipment Grouping. Equipment Grouping allows a user to select a combination of devices that are not necessarily related to each other topographically. For example, a user could create an Equipment Group of sectors that are tied to different MSC’s, are located in different Market’s or Regions, etc. This allows the user to select specific equipment and filter out all the other equipment the user is not interested in.
Publishing allows for performance metrics, formulas, and reports to be standardized throughout the enterprise, ensuring performance management policies and measurements are uniformly utilized throughout the organization. Inaccurate formulation and report calculation is a major problem throughout many organizations. Erroneous analysis and interpretations is a silent killer of quality that can go unnoticed forever. Within InSite, the data schema is published and controlled through the Business Intelligence Layer. Fields, table joins, and formulas are controlled, restricting the fields used on a report to Company or Department-approved formulas and counters. Inaccurate formulation and report calculation errors can be eliminated, preventing mistaken result interpretation -- itself a major performance management problem. There may be 10 different theoretical ways to calculate the same formula, and some could even produce different results, but with Essent InSite for BI, Wireless Communications Carriers can standardize on one definition for a formula and all reports and queries utilizing that field will calculate it with the standardized formula.
The Essent InSite Data Schema warehousing strategy takes raw counters and aggregates them into summary and snapshot tables. The InSite Warehouses improve efficiency in report generation and data storage. Reports spanning multiple days can pull from a daily warehouse, drastically reducing the amount of data queried and calculations performed to generate the report. The warehouses are not only used in canned reports that return multi-day information, but the warehouses are also accessible via the ad hoc query tool, combining the empowerment of the ad hoc query capabilities with the efficiency of the warehoused data.
Warehouses can be divided into two basic types: summary (or aggregated) and snapshot (busy hour). Summary warehouses are most commonly daily or monthly, but also exist in hourly forms for cases such as sub-hourly data and sub-sector data (handoff pair, TRX) data rolled up to the sector level for joining with other sector data. Daily warehouses are in multiple permutations as well, such as 24 hour summed, business hour summed, and non-business hour summed. Examples of monthly warehouses are an aggregation of the entire month, the top 10 busiest hours of the month, the top 11 less the busiest hour of the month (top 2-11 busy hours), plus aggregated versions of those top 10 warehouses for the entire month.
Utilizing these warehouses simplifies the task of constructing high level and multi-day reports that involve the aggregation of extremely large amounts of data. Since portions of this data is already stored in its aggregated form, these reports use less resources and perform fewer operations to extract large summaries of information.
Another utilization of the Essent InSite warehouses is high level canned reports and dashboards. National, Region, and Market level canned reports pull data from warehouses and present a high level view of performance for Managers and Executives. A user can have a monthly performance report for the previous month with data for the month aggregated to Network Element, Market, Region, and System (National) levels available for consumption on the first of the month.
Essent InSite for BI also can provide advanced dash boarding and score carding technologies. These powerful tools place performance measurements in a clear, visually ascetic display right on a users InSite homepage, giving decision makers the ability to watch network performance as it is happening. An example of such a dashboard is a beginning of current month to date gauge of Accessibility, Retainability, and Speech Quality, side-by-side with graphs of the last 12 months in a month-by-month trend of those metrics. The sky's the limit. With Essent InSite for BI any data contained within the system, at any level, for any granularity, can be displayed.