How to Utilize Performance Monitoring to Optimize Your Business Intelligence

According to Gartner’s IT glossary, business intelligence (BI) is defined as “offerings to design, develop and deploy enterprise processes and to integrate, support and manage the related technology applications and platforms.” These include “business and infrastructure applications for BI platforms, analytics needs, and data warehousing infrastructure.”

IT leaders should already be far down the BI roadmap, primarily because you can guarantee most rivals are already on the same journey. Also, as cloud applications and services come pre-loaded with intelligence tools as part of the broadening offering and vendors’ desire to remain relevant in the market, there’s less of a chance of missing the boat.

For those trying to transform a legacy-heavy business or one that’s struggling in migrating to the cloud from old-school applications, the simple solution to convince the leadership that the time to change is now is to explain that “there is value in our data – we just need the applications to extract it, monitor performance and make it understandable.”

With business intelligence and performance monitoring, companies can benefit from:

• Faster decision-making processes
• Identifying performance weaknesses and fixing them
• Making it easier for teams and departments to collaborate with clear data
• Improve customer/client care based on data
• Identify cost-cutting opportunities while enabling big data to drive growth
• Operate efficient SQL databases through performance tuning
• Migrate to on-premises and cloud for greater control of databases.

Whether as part of a broader digital business initiative or a cloud migration to modern tools, BI is the area that can see enterprises generate revenue and value from their data and define future strategies, without the exorbitant IT costs of previous generations’ upgrades. But this only works when databases are fit for purpose, suitably resourced and well-managed.

Business intelligence vs database management

No good will come from BI efforts unless there’s a solid layer of database management underpinning the data. Much of your existing data, especially from legacy database applications, needs to be prepared and cleaned before it can be spun into a BI tool.

This creates a series of challenges for those admins responsible for database management and the BI team leaders hoping to get started quickly. As part of the BI process, ensuring that the data is presentable and valuable should play a vital part in your overall strategy.

To support this effort, database performance monitoring tools like Foglight can help automate the process across hundreds of databases and identify any issues. The clear benefits include:

• Reducing the need for emergency troubleshooting
• Creating a useful baseline for issues, failures and success indicators
• Identifying growth and improvement opportunities from the data
• Allowing teams to work on the BI projects that add business value
• Identify easy wins and high-value targets and drive opportunities
• All done with agentless high-speed data collection to ensure data integrity

How database management can drive insights and fuel BI

Database management makes those big data files more efficient to use and can highlight errors or issues. Administrators often spend half their time fire-fighting these problems, so the promised land of BI may seem far away, but the preemptive approach to database management with modern tools reduces that workload and ensures they can focus on delivering the value that BI promises through change analysis, execution analysis and clear visualizations and reports.

Database management tools ensure their subjects are running at their optimum with low overheads for strong performance. From that basic level, access and queries become more efficient, with optimized queries and faster deep workload performance. With the data flowing smoothly across servers, clouds or data centers, the BI tools are well positioned to extract data and generate valuable insights into the business.

With strong data management, reports will be more accurate, their recommendations based on solid data. And, as BI becomes a key part of the operation, smooth flow of data back-and-forth to check results and update the reports will all run efficiently.

While your organization may not be at the Amazon level of BI, increasingly companies are finding novel ways to differentiate themselves. Take Starbucks’ BI-driven customer loyalty programs, or banking customer experience programs, driven by BI (and increasingly by AI), but all backed up by strong database analysis.

As Deloitte puts it, “A BI Platform without data management is a data swamp – a place where data goes in, but is unable to be retrieved or provide the desired value. Modern business intelligence data management focuses on increasing the value, and thus impact, of modern business intelligence investment.”

With the pace typical of the cloud, BI is fast becoming table stakes for all productivity suites and cloud services – there to be used, but only if your data is good enough. Data mining across the likes of Google BigQuery, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud or documents like Excel, PDF, XML, etc. and various SQL-based systems can all be tapped to deliver insights via analytic reports.

Tools like Foglight Performance Investigator support these efforts with comprehensive database, storage and virtualization monitoring, tracking your databases wherever they operate, along with advanced workload analytics to deliver practical insights.

For the database team, this supports technicalities like data integration and extraction (ETL), cleaning data and providing automated analysis to deliver the most efficient results and use of time. While the data visualization tools might produce sparkling results, only the technical teams need to know the effort required to get there.

Across your industry or market, BI-based analytics delivers the power to drive your business ahead of the competition through relevant insights that can inform the leadership and inspire workers from offices to the shop floor. None of that will work without efficiently managed databases, so ensure they’re in order before the BI generation takes over.