Doing Business Intelligence (BI) the Open Source Way with Pentaho Open Source BI Tool

Business intelligence (BI) which is also referred to as a decision support

system aims to support better business decision making. The role of BI is to

analyze internal, structured data and business processes using technologies,

processes and applications. The common functions of business intelligence

comprise of reporting, data mining, text mining, online analytical processing (OLAP),

predictive analysis, etc.  The BI applications can be driven by user demand,

centrally initiated or mission-critical, enterprise-wide or restricted to one

division, project or department. However, with a slew of  Open source BI tools

available in the market today, choosing the right one is not an easy job. Here

we discuss the installation, configuration and capabilities  of Pentaho Open

Source BI tool.

Pentaho BI platform offers reporting, data integration, data mining, analysis

and dashboard capabilities. The Pentaho BI platform which is designed around

these BI services provides the architecture and infrastructure which in turn is

required to build complete solutions to business problems. The foundation of

Pentaho's BI platform is provided by Authentication, rules engines, workflow,

logging, auditing and a solution engine. Whereas the higher-level, business user

functionality is provided by the service-oriented components such as Pentaho

reporting, Pentaho dashboard and analysis. The Pentaho BI platform is basically

the infrastructure and core services necessary to build , deploy, execute

applications that integrate BI components to complete the suite.

This is the Pentaho user console which can be opened by typing http://localhost:8080. It allows you to create new reports, dashboards, etc

There are different ways in which the BI suite enterprise edition can be

deployed. For instance it can be deployed as an on-premise application or as an

On-demand application with infrastructure. It can also be deployed as an

on-demand application hosting and management services provided by Pentaho. The

Pentaho BI enterprise edition suite also provides additional capabilities that

includes software maintenance, technical support program, certified software,

product expertise and a software assurance program. We would now lets look at

the Pentaho's BI suite capabilities one by one and the installation and

configuration part.

These images represent the installation wizards screenshots that include Pentaho BI applications to install, password for BI server, etc.

this image represents enterprise console which is accessible by typing http://localhost:8088. it contains modules like admin,configuration, etc.

This image represents the step to create a new report wherein it prompts to select data source followed by report settings.

Installation and configuration



Pentaho Enterprise Edn can be installed on both Windows & Linux. The website
gives you the option to take a test drive of the suite. We downloaded the entire

Enterprise Edn of approx 800 MB  and took the demo drive of the suite. The very

first configuration wizard gives you the option to check and install different

modules according to your choice. You can select the modules like BI Server,

Analyzer, Data Integration, Dashboard Designer, etc to be installed. Then it

prompts you to enter the password for repository that stores the contents such

as reports, dashboards, etc. It also installs MySQL that in turn contains the BI

server's solution repository. After this, it again prompts you to enter password

details for the administrator account. This account would be responsible for

logging into the Enterprise Console. Now, to access the enterprise console, just

type in http://localhost:8088/ in your browser. The Pentaho User console can

also be accessed locally by typing in http://localhost:8080/ and then it prompts

to enter the login credentials. From the user console, you can start making new

reports, new analyzer reports and new dashboards. The enterprise console

contains modules like administration, status, configuration, utilities, support,

etc. In the administration module, you can add users, configure database

connections, etc. In the configuration section, you can do web settings, manage

repositories, etc.

Pentaho Reporting



For any organization, reporting is considered as an important aspect which

is  a core business intelligence need. Being used in different forms in

organizations, it is also frequently the first BI application deployed. The

Pentaho reporting capabilities includes web-based ad hoc query and reporting for

business users, data source support including relational, OLAP,  based data

sources. With Pentaho report designer, it makes easy for the report authors to

design reports, to connect to data. It also provides a rich set of features that

are delivered via Open Source model. Thus the Pentaho reporting makes it easy

for an organization to easily access, distribute information across customers,

partners and employees.  In just few simple steps, reports can be quickly

designed using the streamlined report wizard. You start by selecting the 'New

Reports' menu on the console. Then choose the data source, thumbnails, templates

from the options available. Once the configuration part is done, you just need

to click on the View Report button and you are ready to go.

This shows the dashboard's capabilities wherein it allows you to drill down to specific information you want.

This shows the different labels that we chose from the list of given options along with its preview. The structure, data, style and its attributes are shown on the right hand side.

Pentaho Analyzer



This particular feature lets non-technical business users understand and

take important decisions based on the analytical reports. The Pentaho analyzer

provides an interactive way through which reports can be generated easily. This

web-based intuitive platform allows to do sorting, filtering, drag and drop

based report creation, chart visualizations and much more. To begin, from the

dashboard, select the New Analyzer report followed by the schema and cube. To

build reports, you simply need to drag the fields and it also gives you the

choice of viewing your reports in table, bars, pie, stack forms, etc.

Pentaho Dashboard



Talking about dashboard, it is basically a user interface that organizes and

presents information in a very readable manner. Dashboards is also a management

tool that uses combination of graphs, scorecards & report components. By the use

of these different combinations, it helps in delivering current, specific &

relevant information to employees.

Thus because of dashboards being highly visual, they are easy to read and

interpret and helps in answering critical questions about the performance of the

employees specific departments. It also enables employees to know that the plan

they are implementing is effective, how it compares to the competition & any

metrics defined by us.

The Pentaho Dashboard helps business users in providing the critical

information they need in order to improve the organizational performance. It

also provides a detailed insight into the enterprise, individual or departmental

performance. To create a new dashboard, from the user console select the New

dashboard and after that select the template followed by theme and its

properties. The content that you want to display, created in a dashboard can

include reports, charts and also Pentaho analyzer reports.The Dashboard module

contains different files such as Google maps, KPI dashboards, Revenue analysis,

sales analysis, etc. It also allows you to display different content types in

the dashboard such as charts, data table, file, URL, etc. So, for instance, by

the collaboration of google maps in Pentaho, a sales manager is able to see

different sales & other information regional wise. Also it would help them to

drill down into the sales details.

Pentaho Report Designer



The Pentaho Report Designer as a part of the enterprise edition is included

in the design tools. This application  provides a visual design environment to

create report definitions. There are two ways in which the report definitions

can be saved after executing, locally via Pentaho report designer or publishing

it through BI Server. Thus it allows many people to access and schedule report

execution.

To begin after selecting the PRD, it prompts to select the report wizard or

create new report. We selected the report wizard. First it ask to select the

template from different categories, like fall, spring, Pentaho, etc. Then it

prompts to select the data source followed by layout steps, in which there is a

list of available items that you can select. To preview the data, there are

different options to choose from; HTML, PDF, XLS, etc. And to edit any of the

fields, you just need to double click on that label and it shows the structure

along with data on the right hand side.