Tool Mentor: Configuring Rational Insight for Data Storage
This tool mentor describes the required configuration steps that you need to perform before you start using the tool.
Tool: IBM Rational Insight
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Main Description

IBM® Rational® Insight provides measurement infrastructure for software delivery. It has been implemented to collect most software development-related data and provide sample metrics for software delivery best practices. There are a few things to configure before you can use the tool. 

1 Prepare the data sources

You will extra data from the data sources. Typically, these are tools that manage operational data for software delivery. You need to configure them to expose the operational data appropriately and to set up necessary privileges for ETL to access the data.

IBM® Rational® Insight supports extracting data from both Rational Insight data services and generic REST service or XML files. You can refer to Get started > Preparing the data sources in the ETL section of the Administering Rational Insight topic in Rational Insight information center to see what needs to be done.

If you need more details about how to install and configure Rational Insight data services,  see the sections about Rational Insight data services in the Installing Rational Insight topic in Rational Insight information center.

2 Prepare the data warehouse

The data warehouse is where you will store the measurement results. You need to create the data warehouse and set up necessary privileges before you run ETL.

If you chose the automatic installation option while installing Rational Insight data warehouse, the data warehouse will be created and configured correctly. No further action is required. If you chose the manual installation option, instead, you need to create an empty database by running the script that comes with the installation package of IBM® Rational® Insight.

 See Get started > Preparing the data warehouse in ETL section of the Administering Rational Insight topic in Rational Insight information center for more details.

3 Prepare the ETL catalog

IBM® Rational® Insight uses IBM Cognos Data Manager for ETL. The ETL catalog is the database that this data manager uses to store ETL logic definitions. Before you can run ETL, you need to set up the catalog and put the Rational Insight sample ETL definitions in it by following these steps:

  1. Create a new empty database.
  2. Use Cognos Data Manager to create a new empty catalog in the database
  3. Restore the catalog backup file that contains the Rational Insight sample ETL implementation into the newly created catalog.

 See Get started > Preparing the ETL catalog in the ETL section of the Administering Rational Insight topic in Rational Insight information center for more details.

4 Connect to the data sources

In this step, you need to update connection information used by ETL to point to the data sources in your environment.

For the data sources that can be accessed through Rational Insight data services, or a generic REST service or XML file, IBM® Rational® Insight provides an XML ODBC driver to connect the data sources with Cognos Data Manager. For these data sources, if you chose XML Data Configuration and the sample data sources when installing Rational Insight, the XML ODBC driver and the sample ODBC data sources should have been installed and configured correctly. The only thing that you need to do is to open the .xdc file used by ETL with XML Data Configuration, and then update the URL, user name, and password of the resource group to point to the data sources that you set up in Step 1.

 See Get started > Preparing the data sources in the ETL section of the Administering Rational Insight topic in Rational Insight information center for more details.

For the data warehouse, or other data sources that are based on the database (for example, IBM® Rational® Team Concert), open the connection in the data manager and update the connection information to point to the database in your environment. 

 See Get started > Defining the data source connections in the ETL section of the Administering Rational Insight topic in Rational Insight information center for more details.

5 Deploy ETL jobs

The last step is to deploy the ETL job and then specify the time and frequency to run the ETL job.

In Rational Insight, you can publish the ETL jobs defined in Cognos Data Manager as data movement tasks on the BI server. After that, you can run the data movement tasks directly or schedule them for future execution.

 See Customizing ETL builds > Deploying ETL jobs in the ETL section of the Administering Rational Insight topic in Rational Insight information center for more details.