IBM BPM, V8.0.1, All platforms > Authoring services in Integration Designer > Developing monitor models > What are monitor models?

Dimensional models

The dimensional model is the part of the monitor model that contains the cubes used for dimensional analysis. The cubes in turn contain measures and dimensions.

If you are planning to use Cognos for dimensional analysis in the dashboards, define a dimensional model.

If you have collected a considerable amount of data, such as the sales figures for every product your company makes, you should be able to retrieve information from this data that will answer questions such as these:

• What are the total sales for each product by location?
• Which products are selling best over time?
• Who is your highest-performing salesperson?

You can generate multidimensional charts and graphs based on historical business performance data. In dimensional analysis, a large table of facts is described using measures and dimensions. Measures take on many values and participate in calculations; dimensions are entry points for manipulating and analyzing the data in meaningful ways.

As an example of dimensional analysis, consider an insurance company that has a claim process and uses Business Monitor to monitor each of the claims. Each claim is represented by a monitoring context instance and has metrics such as claim number, policy number, amount, type, status, claim date, country, city, and processing time. The company wants to analyze the claims at an aggregate level and visualize the data by various groupings. They use dimensional analysis to do so. They create measures, which include average claim amount, total claim amount, total number of claims, and average claim processing duration. These measures can be analyzed by specific dimensions.

For example, they can look at the total number of claims of type auto in 2006, and can drill down to see the number of claims by month and day. They can look at the total number of claims that have not been paid. They can further analyze the data by country and city to get a better understanding of the nature of the claims and how the claim process is performing in various regions.

• Cubes
  A cube is a multidimensional representation of the information needed for online analytical processing. The dimensional model overlays a cube structure on a monitoring context definition, which defines the way that information collected by monitoring context instances is stored. To perform dimensional analysis in the dashboards, use Cognos with Business Monitor.
• Measures
  Measures are calculations based on metrics, keys, counters, or stopwatches. A measure points to a metric (such as order amount) and distills the instance information into something that is useful, such as the average order amount, the total order amount (using the sum function), or the total number of orders (using the count function).

  You can define measures to be used in dimensional analysis in the dashboards.

• Dimensions
  Dimensions are data categories used to organize and select monitoring context instances for reporting and analysis. Some examples of dimensions are time, accounts, products, and markets. Dimensions are composed of one or more hierarchical levels.

  For example, a Location dimension can have City, Region, and Country levels.

What are monitor models?