IBM® Rational® Insight (Rational Insight)
helps you get consistent metrics from across the organization and
tool sets to objectively measure status and progress. It implements
standard measurements, reports, and dashboards to provide accurate
insight into systems and software delivery. It helps follow a systematic
approach to incrementally improve business, identify high priority
business objectives and software delivery practices to address those
objectives, and measure practice adoption and business results.
Rational Insight automatically
and objectively measures and reports program, project, and team level
progress and status against pre-defined business objectives. Measurement
guidance is taken from deployed practices, regulatory requirements,
and best practices. The Rational Insight Enterprise
Reporting server provides an extensive library of report and dashboard
elements for scheduling and forecasting. It also contains the Rational Method Composer Performance
Measurement Practices application. This application provides the foundation
of methods and activities to effectively establish and maintain an
infrastructure to capture and report metrics that quantify the organization's
achievement of defined performance objectives.
Rational Insight enables
an organization to:
- Gain insight into software project performance and health through
objective and consistent reporting
- Manage and mitigate software development risks, reduce time-to-market,
and improve product quality
- Control software project costs and improve global development
efficiencies
- Enforce governance and achieve compliance in a changing global
environment
Architecture
Rational Insight leverages
Web architecture to extract data from distributed systems and generate
both live and historical cross-product reports. It supports data retrieval
from sources using either the REST architecture or direct database
access. This data can be represented through customized dashboards
and reports.
Rational Insight contains
the following main components:
- IBM Cognos® Data
Manager (Data Manager)
- IBM Rational Insight
data warehouse (RIDW)
- IBM Cognos Framework
Manager (Framework
Manager)
- IBM Rational Insight
report server (Rational Insight
report server)
- IBM Cognos Business Intelligence Server (Cognos BI Server)
- IBM Rational Insight
XML data configuration (XML data configuration)
- IBM Rational Insight
Data Services (Data
Services)
Data Manager performs
the core extract, transform, and load (ETL) functions of
Rational Insight.
It interacts with various data sources and extracts data from them.
XML data configuration converts
data in XML form to tabular format. It defines the mapping between
XML source files and the destination tables. Based on this mapping,
the XML ODBC driver converts the XML data into relational form.
The
RIDW component is a database that stores an organization's information
in normalized operational data stores and dimensional data marts.
The RIDW can be hosted on IBM DB2®, Oracle or SQL Server. RIDW
has an open schema. Any business intelligence tool can access RIDW
to generate business reports. They can also use Data Services if the
reporting server hosting the business tools supports a REST architecture.
Framework
Manager is a metadata modeling tool with which you can handle the
generation of queries. A metadata model is a collection of metadata
that includes physical and business information for one or more data
sources.
The Rational Insight
report server is
an instance of the Cognos BI
Server. The Cognos BI Server
is an integrated business intelligence suite that provides a wide
range of functions to help you understand your organization's
data. The components of the Cognos BI
Server are: Report Studio, Query Studio, Cognos Connection, and Cognos Administration.
Rational Insight provides
sample ETL catalogs and metadata models for the following products:
- IBM Rational products such as Rational ClearQuest®, Rational ClearCase®, Rational RequisitePro®, Rational Team Concert, Rational Quality Manager and Rational TestManager
- Microsoft® Project
- RIDW
Rational Insight can
support any data source that provides REST services for accessing
data.
The high-level architecture of the Rational Insight solution
is shown graphically in the following picture.
In a typical software development
life cycle, data management is required in the following areas:
- Requirements
- Architecture
- Process and portfolio
- Quality
- Change and release
A different tool can be used for each area to store, manage,
and analyze data. The data analysis tools can be deployed on distributed
systems, and accessed and used by geographically distributed teams
with differing levels of responsibility.
Rational Insight uses
the open web architecture to extract data from these disparate sources.
Each data source is identified as a resource through a unique URL.
The REST GET method is used to extract the data and represent it in
formats such as XML or Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). The open web
architecture makes it possible for
Rational Insight to
extract data from any data source and not just from IBM Rational products.
Rational Insight supports
two kinds of reports.
- Live reports: Live reports use data from operational source systems
and data stores.
- Historical reports: These reports use historical data pulled from
the data marts to identify trends and aggregate information.
You can use the ETL capabilities of
Rational Insight to
extract data through the REST GET interface or direct database access,
transform the data through the encoded business rules, and load the
transformed data into a conformed data mart. During this process,
operational data is retrieved from a product source as an XML resource,
mapped to relational data tables, and normalized in the data warehouse.
Rational Insight Enterprise
Reporting server provides a comprehensive array of business intelligence
functions in one product, on a single, proven architecture, including
seamless reporting and dashboard capabilities.