How to recreate in CABI something that you wrote in Dashboard Designer

[Garin Walsh]

So far, near as I can find anyone will admit, if there's a feature in 20.1 today that's implemented in Flash, it will cease to exist in the product when 20.3 is released. When asking product management the question of whether anything still implemented in Flash will be ported away from Flash all I get is silence. The most recent roadmap session essentially says that Broadcom will expect that any investment a customer has in a current Flash based piece of the product will be lost and that the customer will be expected to recreate that investment in one of the other Broadcom offerings. Supposedly it's going to be easy.

So, fully expecting that Broadcom will follow through on that approach, I'd like to start a conversation about how one ports Dashboard Designer to CABI.

Has anyone built a custom CABI dashboard?

Going through the documentation it appears that I am required to use a tool that TIBCO supplies: 

Can I create my own dashboards and reports?

You can create your own dashboards and reports using the commercial edition of Jaspersoft Studio. This software is not provided with the CABI for UIM Dashboards. You can download a trial version of the software from the Download Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite page. To complete the installation, you must copy and then import the jasperserver.license file into Jaspersoft Studio. The jasperserver.license file is located in <Nimsoft>\probes\service\cabi\cabi.

So, does owning UIM grant me full license to this tool? 

Does anyone have instructions on how to set this up and configure it to work with UIM?

How does this work with contact based accounts? it appears that CABI bypasses the database access that wasp uses and so is it true that one has to recreate all the account to origin assignment access restrictions?

Does anyone have the experience to put together a quick tutorial on how one would implement the following: A "dashboard" that has three "pages" - a top level page with a single alarm widget on it that displays the max alarm level of all alarms associated with the contact logged in, a detail page that displays alarm widgets where the alarms are filtered by some value (say user_tag_1), and then a third level page reached by clicking one of these widgets that displays the alarms filtered by contact and the previous filter (like user_tag_1)

-Garin

[Robert Jones]

Garin,

Very well put.  I look forward to any answers that you receive!

RJ

[Garin Walsh]

Well the first of many hurdles is that the jasperserver.license file is not located in <Nimsoft>\probes\service\cabi\cabi as the documentation indicates.

It appears that on a system with CABI installed, there's a jasperserver.license file at C:\Program Files (x86)\Nimsoft\c\ca_install and C:\Program Files (x86)\Nimsoft\probes\service\wasp\webapps\cabijs.

It appears that the files are the same but for arguments sake I tried importing the one located in ca_install and it appears to apply successful:

[Luc Christiaens]

Hi Garin,
If you listen to the last UIM webcast at 38:45 there is a question about the future of CABI.  
If I understand correctly the answer they are saying that in the near future they are going away from CABI to another reporting system!

[Garin Walsh]

Not to sound sarcastic but as soon as the conversation about the "data lake" started, the whole presentation lost credibility.

Which as an aside, from an engineering standpoint, if one has full control over the creation of the data, why create a process that makes this problematic lake occur and then struggle with processes to fix it after the fact? Why not just collect the data smarter and avoid the lake altogether?

My problem isn't the "Lake", it's the fact that the software feature set changes out from underneath me constantly. No one will publicly say what my visualization tool will be in November of this year and there is zero guarantee that said tool will exist in the product the following June. Agile or not, there's no way I can wrap development and product release around a core technology that is so uncertain and secret..

[Dan Gill]

The Dashboard portlet is HTML5. Are you referring to the old Dashboard Designer from a few versions back?

[Garin Walsh]

You are correct - I was working off documentation published by Broadcom a couple weeks ago but it appears that Dashboard was included in the list of portlets to be dropped in 20.3 erroneously. Or it was a leftover reference to the long deprecated older dashboard tool.

[Dan Gill]

Would you mind linking to the documentation? I'm interested in reviewing the list.

The PRD and List portlets are Flash, so we do need to stop using those.

As for CABI learning tools, I don't know if Broadcom still includes UR training in the Advanced Reporting and Techniques course; however, it is very similar to old UR reporting.

I used to teach the courses through 8.51 and I was able to use that knowledge for CABI. I do wish they had real documentation on configuration though. For example, I recently upgraded JasperStudio and I lost the ability to connect to our environment. I have a report that I can't change now because I upgraded JasperStudio.

You could do everything you've described in CABI, but I think you'd still be better off with the Dashboard portlet. It's far easier to support. Most of my CABI use is for static (point-in-time) reporting.

[Luc Christiaens]

Dan, You describe the reverse world.
We use PRD and List reports very heavily.  It is up to UIM dev. to come up with a replacement tool that is at least as good.
I do not see how we can create, in a similar very easy way, these List and PRD reports in CABI, so at least they need to provide a tool to convert all the production PRD and List reports into CABI (or whatever tool they will use).

[Dan Gill]

Sorry, @Luc Christiaens, I didn't mean that it should be up to us. Based on Garin's original post and the lack of clear guidance on what will happen with 20.3, I do think we ought to prepare. Flash support ends at the end of the year and 20.3 drops the third quarter of this year. That doesn't leave us much time if we discover that Broadcom won't port our existing lists and charts.

Ideally, we need a commitment from Broadcom. Barring that commitment, we need to prepare for the worst and hope for the best. That preparation comes in many forms. We could try migrating to CABI, or we could try a different product altogther. I'm sure there are other options as well.

Basically it's the same conversation over at UIM 20.x tidbits. I'll post over there about the correction to the Dashboard portlet.