Microsoft Office Performance Point Server - Monitoring Server Operation

Monitoring Server Operation

The Monitoring and Analytics features, which include Dashboards, Scorecards, KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), Reports, Filters, and Strategy Maps, are delivered via a Monitoring Server, which includes two client user interfaces: Dashboard Designer and SharePoint Web Parts. Dashboard Designer is downloaded from Monitoring Server, and enables business analysts or IT Administrators to:

• create data source connections
• create views that use those data connections
• assemble the views in a dashboard
• deploy the dashboard to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 or Windows SharePoint Services.

Dashboard Designer saves content and security information to a SQL Server 2005 database that is managed through Monitoring Server. Data source connections, such as OLAP cubes or relational tables, are also made through Monitoring Server. Reports based on these data source connections are run and updated through Monitoring Server, however some reports, such as PivotTables and PivotCharts, have independent connections to their source data (queries for these reports are not processed by Monitoring Server).

After a dashboard has been published to the Monitoring System Database, it can be deployed to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 or Windows SharePoint Services. HTML pages that represent the dashboard content are stored in a document library and can be viewed in a browser. When dashboards are opened in a browser, Monitoring Server updates the data in the views by connecting back to the original data source and retrieving the most current data.

PerformancePoint Monitoring Server comes with an API that allows developers to add extensions to the Dashboard Designer, such as custom reports, custom data source providers, custom wizards, and user interface extensions.