Monitoring Metrics

Enterprise Monitoring Suite features canned metrics for Oracle applications, flexible alerts, and a Web GUI

By Ganesh Variar

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Metrics can be related to one another in a parent/child relationship, and users can perform report drilldowns from one metric report to a related metric report. For example, you can drill down from a report containing the month's sales figures to a report that segments those figures by product type.

You can designate users to be alerted when a particular metric reaches its threshold. Alerts can consist of actions such as sending an email or pager message, running another metric, running a PL/SQL stored procedure, executing a shell script, bringing up a particular Web page, or calling a custom-built Java class. For example, you can set up an alert that will bring up the intranet purchasing page when the inventory level for a particular product falls below the threshold value.

In addition to threshold triggers, you can also run alerts according to a schedule. MetricStream's user interface includes a "My Tasks" list. A task is a system-generated "to-do" item that prompts a designated user to perform a specific action. Both thresholds and schedules can trigger tasks. MetricStream also provides an "On Demand" module that lets users create parameterized reports on the fly and execute actions as needed.

MORE METRICS?

MetricStream's eBM suite is easy to use and empowers users to identify and track metrics that help them make better decisions. The product can someday be more versatile if MetricStream provides predefined metrics for more ERP solutions than just Oracle Applications. MetricStream should also expand the domain of use for eBM by providing access to additional data sources, such as flat files, HTML, and XML sources. The system's alerting capabilities would be improved by the ability to route messages to multichannel devices such as mobile phones or personal digital assistants.

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MetricStream's eBM suite is a best-of-breed tool that promotes system integration by providing businesses with the ability to monitor business process metrics and proactively detect and resolve discrepancies. If your organization has invested in Oracle Applications, MetricStream's predefined set of metrics provides an additional incentive to try the product.

Ganesh Variar [ganesh_variar@yahoo.com] is a project manager at Saama Technologies, a Silicon Valley-based consulting firm. He has seven years' experience in managing and designing business intelligence solutions.

RESOURCES

Categoric Software: www.categoric.com

Metagon: www.metagon.com

WorkWise: www.workwise.com

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