Monitoring Server Topology

Monitoring Server Topology

This topology shows all the monitoring server components working together. The Monitoring Server, Monitoring Database, the Dashboard Designer and the Dashboard Viewer for SharePoint are all part of the dashboard life cycle.

The monitoring server contains two web sites (Central and Preview web sites) and a web services. The Dashboard Designer is launched from the Central web site. The designer communicates to the monitoring server to build and publish dashboard to the monitoring database. The Dashboard Designer can deploy to the preview web site on the monitoring server to preview a dashboard. The dashboard designer also deploys dashboard to the Windows SharePoint server with the Dashboard Viewer for SharePoint installed, once the dashboard is deployed to the Windows SharePoint server the dashboard can be viewed.

When viewing the dashboard through the Dashboard Viewer for SharePoint Services, the user browses to the SharePoint site clicks on dashboard document and the dashboard starts to render. The Dashboard Viewer for SharePoint Services connects to the monitoring database reads the dashboard definitions that were published to the database and then renders the dashboard. The data in the views is obtained by the Dashboard Viewer for SharePoint Services connecting to the data sources, gathering the data and rendering the view. Notice in this process the Monitoring Server is not involved. Once a dashboard is published to the database and deployed to the Windows SharePoint server the Monitoring Server is not needed to render the dashboard.

 

When viewing the dashboard a couple of export features are available, export to Excel and export to PowerPoint. One other feature to note is when building dashboards the designer can deploy scorecard to a SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services server.

 

Dashboard communicates to monitoring database and the data sources

I would like to reiterate the fact that the Monitoring Dashboard Viewer for SharePoint Services contains all the rendering capabilities. This means when a dashboard is viewed the Dashboard Viewer for SharePoint Services web part reads the monitoring database, connects to the data sources and renders the dashboard. The Dashboard Viewer for SharePoint Services does not communicate with the Monitoring Server. Notice is the diagram the Windows SharePoint system does not connect to the Monitoring Server. Publishing a dashboard to the database and deploying the dashboard to SharePoint gives the Dashboard Viewer of SharePoint Services all it needs to display the dashboard.

Comments

• Anonymous
  December 04, 2007
  Aly, Our clients range from mid-size to enterprise (global).  Is there any reference material around scaling PPS from small shop (single server) to large scale organization with a distributed server/service infrastructure? BI Joe

• Anonymous
  December 04, 2007
  See the scalability doc at:   http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb660539.aspx And post: http://blogs.msdn.com/performancepoint/archive/2007/08/22/monitoring-server-scalability-tips.aspx

• Anonymous
  October 23, 2008
  Hi Alyson - I wanted to confirm something that I thought we spoke about at the BI Conference;  as I start to deploy PPS to our enterprise, I was planning a single M&A server (to start with) or load balanced set of servers that would potentially host many projects, from many different areas of our Company.  Is there any way to "segment" the administration of the PPS users so that someone who is an Administrator level role on one project does not wind up with CRUD rights to the whole infrastructure / all project's dashboards?  e.g. am looking for an "instance" model effect similar to what SQL-Server supports.   Thx!  -Rob Stoffel, Eli Lilly

• Anonymous
  October 24, 2008
  Hi Rob - The Monitoring server is really only there to support the designers, you will not have to have more than 1 of those unless you end up with many, many designers.  For scale out, you want to scale your SharePoint boxes with the PPS web parts. The best way to split people up is for you to make display folders in designer and have the content creators create content only in their display folders and then have them publish to different document libraries, then you can control security at the document library level in SharePoint and make sure your designers apply the security to the items they create in designer as well.  Make sense?  If not feel free to email me at alysonp@microsoft.com Thanks, Alyson

• Anonymous
  March 15, 2012
  Hi, Could you please help me with the following question? Is there a way for a farm administrator to subscribe to an error alert generated from PeformancePoint Service? So when something goes wrong with the service, you get an alert from the sever before you get one from you users