I like PerformancePoint Dashboards

PerformancePoint (PPS) dashboards really are easy to create once you have an OLAP cube with useful information. One of my cubes, Weblogs, is continually updating with all the web activity on my site RichardLees.com.au. In a couple of days, two and a half years ago, I built some PPS dashboards as a public demonstration. I still find them very interesting and a useful guide for activity and performance on my site.

You can see the same information I can. The picture on the right, is a dashboard pointing at the weblogs cube. To get to it, just click on the Web Analytics dashboard on the left hand menu of http://RichardLees.com.au/sites/demonstrations. Then click on the Web Performance tab on the top of the dashboard. The scorecard, is asking for the last 6 days on columns and the top 20 http resource types on rows. It will continually adapt to the date and web activity. It doesn't end there, you can click on any resource type (in the picture, I have clicked on .aspx) so that the 3 right hand charts will dynamically filter to this resource type. At a glance I can see which particular resources are most active and their response time trends. From the bottom chart, it would appear that most of the .aspx resources have been progressively slowing down over the last 12 months. This might be due to the increased activity, database size growing, or perhaps my web site is competing for internet bandwidth with my boys web downloads. I'll investigate further.

The point I would like to make, is that once you have useful information in a cube, it is really quite a simple job to create some dynamic and interesting dashboards. If you are heading towards dashboards, I would encourage you to start by very loosely defining what you want on the dashboard. You only need to determine what information your cube requires. Then once, you have the cube, you can be creative with the dashboards to see how to maximise the information you have available. In my experience, what tends to happen is that you will start with a generic dashboard, then, with feedback, make more dynamic functionality so that users are able to easily drill down to the interesting aspects.

There is really only one gotcha that stands out for me and that is the client browser. Internet Explorer 7 and 8, obviously, are very good clients. Other browsers, don't support all PPS dashboard functionality. Of course, if you have a particular browser in question, you could browse to my demonstration and see how well it does. Feel free to post comments on this blog with your results.

By the way, I have similar beliefs about SQL Server Reporting Services. Once you have a cube with all the information, dynamic reporting is quite simple. Also, Reporting Services and PerformancePoint should be seen as complementary, rather than alternatives.

Bing.com - Microsoft's new search engine

Have you checked out Microsoft's beta search engine, Bing.com? It has some nice features and now look much more like Google.com.

I have noticed that it is rising on my Top Referrers List. Currently it is in the top 20 and rising. For an up to date list see http://RichardLees.com.au/Sites/Demonstrations

By the way, I count 1 referrer as one person clicking on a link from Bing.com to somewhere on http://RichardLees.com.au So far this month (June) Bing.com has made 45 referrals compared to Google, several hundred, or blogspot.com with 1679.

For real time web analytics see RichardLees.com.au

Leaving Footprints All Over the Internet

Someone recently asked me if my web analytics dashboard (http://RichardLees.com.au/Sites/Demonstrations) records information on where they had been on my site. The answer is an emphatic Yes. Not that my site does anything special in the logging department. I am just using Windows IIS and by default it will log every http request. The only extra thing I do is that I put this data in a cube so that it is easy to query and visualise. You should remember that everytime you browse to a page on the internet, there is probably a log on that server recording your IP address, what you requested, date, time etc. And there will often be additional information such as your browser configuration, even the operating system and version number. If you are accessing the internet via a proxy server, then your IP address is shared amongst other proxy server users so you are somewhat camouflaged. But if you are using a proxy server, then you should consider the proxy server is logging every request you make over the internet, and possibly all the intranet browsing too.

So, as I was saying, my site puts all the web logs into a cube so that you can visualise all the activity on my site, even what I do. I built it quite simply as a demonstration of OLAP technology.

You can ad hoc query the activity on my site using ThinSlicer or PerformancePoint. Both of these tools are thin client, only requiring IE6 (or above) and there are no client controls. So if you have been to my site (anything on http://richardlees.com.au/) then you will be able to browse the cube and see where you have been and what resources you used on my server at the time. Simply go to the Interactive Chart Grid on http://RichardLees.com.au/Sites/Demonstrations and navigate to your IP address and display the requests you have made. This is using Microsoft's PerformancePoint dashboard technology, which takes a little getting used to, but it is a fully functional cube browser. For example, the picture above is a query I made, drilling into IP address 84.151.222.71, which happens to be in Munich, Germany. I then drilled into .jpg files to see what pictures had been downloaded. If you don't know your IP address, you can drill down to your geographic location and select the IP address active at the time you were on the site. You could even browse to my site requesting a resource that does not exist, such as HelenClark.jpg, since you will be the only person requesting this resource, you will be able to drill into this resource and list out your own IP address etc. You could then pivot on the IP address and see what else you requested. The cube is available for continuous querying, even though it is being updated with new logs every 15 minutes or so.

Please note, I do not use these web logs for anything other than providing a demonstration of OLAP and data mining technologies. There is no reason to feel paranoid about what I store on my server, but it might make you think about what information other web sites have about your activity.