The team at Infolytik has been working very hard to finally bring to the community MetaMiner Community Edition: the first free ultra-light, cross-platform SAP BI4 and XI3 landscape visualization app aimed towards helping administrators and architects become more productive and efficient with their time spent managing SAP BusinessObjects resources.
Q: What doesMetaMiner Community Edition do?
A: MetaMiner CE is an ultra-thin high performance client that connects directly to the MetaMiner Server and allows for Google-like search and discovery across all of your BI assets like Web Intelligence, Crystal Report or Xcelisus Dashboards. Furthermore, MetaMiner reveals a complete CMS object hierarchy, or tree, providing even the deepest of insights into your users' Favorites and Inbox folders.
 |  |  |
| CMS Explorer is a complete rendition of your Business Objects folder hierarchy | Meta Query: True freehand SQL against your CMS metadata | Filter groups provide quick slice and dice across corporate assets like instances and schedules |
Q: What insights will it provide to better manage my Business Objects XI3 or BI4 deployment?
A: There are lots of them. Here are a few off the top of my head:
| MetaMiner Community Can Answer This Question... | Why its helpful |
|---|---|
| We're performing a cutover from our XI3 environment to a brand new BI4 one. We've completed the initial migration but want to know - what reports were changed or created in the last 15 days? | In order to remain within compliance and adhere to process and promotion workflows, we must ensure that any unauthorized BI content authored directly in the new BI4 environment is accounted for (or removed) |
| Joe's about to leave the organization and he's authored many reports in different places. How can I quickly identify all their content and re-assign it to another user? | When deleting a user in an organization, it automatically deletes their related reports and content. Their "Public" content is also promoted to "Administrator" as far as ownership goes. By answering this question we can more easily delegate content to a more accurate person in the organization and preserve BI continuity of the user who's leaving the company. |
| We have hundreds of scheduled reports in our environment, but managing them has become difficult. Is there a way to know how many schedules are running, by status and how long do they run for? | Query execution and delivery time can be measured by duration of schedules. Luckily, MetaMiner CE captures all of this data. And by understanding duration times more we can gain tighter control over when and to whom to schedule content, and schedule the longer-running, "heavier" schedules to another machine, or during off-peak hours (or procure new hardware if needed). |
| Lately, our reports running from a specific job server seem to be failing. We'd like to reschedule those jobs on a different server but how do I find out all failed jobs using a specific job server? | Again, to maintain BI continuity in the organization, it's critical to learn of where the failure points are and how to remedy them ASAP. It could be a scheduled report or QaaWS component that fails, and now the executive board is looking at stale, outdated data. We do not want this scenario! |
| We keep running out of space on our file store (FRS). Is there an easy way to determine who's utilizing most of the disk space, and the reports that have the largest file size? | There are a number of reasons why being alerted of resource exhaustion is important. An untrained user may be developing "run-away" reports that query more data than they should. Other reports may simply store more data than they need, and could be re-saved to the CMS with purged dataproviders, and thus save time and money to the organization. |
Q: Awesome! How can I get MetaMiner Community Edition and start using it right away in my XI3 or BI4 environment?
A: It's simple: Just head over to http://www.infolytik.com/downloads , install the software and then request a CE (free) license key from us and its yours to use - for free, forever.
And don't forget to visit some of the other awesome resources available to those wanting to learn more about Query Builder, CMS metadata and understanding the SAP BI4 or XI3 platform "under the hood", like Mani's expert series on using the Query Builder and the difference between CMS data vs. Audit data.
In upcoming parts to this series we will answer even more questions and perform more analysis and help uncover the wealth of information harnessed inside your BI platform!
Happy Reporting!
Atul Chowdhury
Infolytik