Data communication

Performance Dashboard can publish analysis results from any source systems for which special connectors are available. When installing Performance Dashboard, you can specify the connectors for particular source systems. Connectors for displaying Management views and dashboards are supplied with PPM.

The license for displaying Management views is included in your PPM license, while the license for displaying dashboards must be purchased separately and activated in your PPM system.

Performance Dashboard uses the Corba format to exchange data with the source system. Corba is a universal protocol format for running distributed applications in a network. Performance Dashboard uses two independent Corba connections to the source system for authentication and to query analysis results.

Authentication

When you call up the dashboard start URL, the interactive login page is displayed. Once you have entered the user name and password, Performance Dashboard establishes a Corba connection to the source system specified in the Login module and transfers the user data entered. If the source system allows the user to log in, a list of all dashboards for which the specified user has access privileges is displayed.

Query analysis results

When the user selects a dashboard from the list, the second connection to the source system is established and is used to transfer measure queries from the dashboard. This connection is specified in the connection XML element in the configuration file for the selected dashboard. You can define several connections and assign them to particular queries, e.g., if you want to display queries from other source systems or you want to use data access privileges from the PPM source system.

The users used to establish the Corba connections are retrieved from certain configuration files and are independent of the user name specified to log in. You can display measure queries for different source systems on a dashboard page by assigning connectors for those source systems to particular measure queries.