Dimensions view

Using the Dimensions view users can generate multidimensional reports that analyze different business aspects of historical business-performance data. Charts and grids present data for analysis against different dimensions.

A dimension is a conceptual axis over which a business is analyzed. For example, a retail business performance might be analyzed by time, products, and stores. For this business, time, products, and stores are dimensions. Each of the dimensions has one or more levels that together define the overall hierarchy of the dimension. The time dimension might have year, quarter, and month levels.

Let us assume you have collected a lot of data, for example, sales figures for every product your company makes, and you need to retrieve information from this data, and find answers to questions like:

To answer these and other questions, you can use the Dimensions view. It extracts, organizes, and summarizes your data. You can use it to analyze the data, make comparisons, detect patterns and relationships, and discover trends. This view requires a business measures model that contains defined dimensions and metrics, which are needed for the multidimensional report for each subject area (business-measures group).

For example, a subject area can include two dimensions: a location dimension with region, country, and city levels, and a product dimension with product category and product name levels. A metric for total sales could then provide sales figures for each product and type in each city, region, and country.

The way you want to represent your data in the Dimensions view depends on your selection of row, column, and page dimensions. Those parameters visualize the selected dimensions in tables and charts.

The Dimensions view provides a number of additional dimensions that can be used in your multidimensional report of a selected subject area. Creation Time and Termination Time are two default dimensions that are not defined in the business measures model. However, the WebSphere® Business Monitor creates and calculates them at run time to assist your analysis. As time dimensions, each can be drilled down on the levels of Year, Month, and Day.

Another dimension is Measures, which encompasses all the aggregate business measures. Among the included business measures, the InstancesCount measure is created and calculated at runtime for the selected subject area.

Before the multidimensional analysis report for business activities in the Dimensions view can be generated, the dashboard administrator must configure this view. Configuration tasks include:

The configuration saved by the Administrator role can be personalized later by other roles, provided they have access to the view edit mode, for example, the Privileged User role.

Dimensions view

The Dimensions view keeps records of the last saved configuration and edit settings, allowing you to revert to previous settings whenever needed. For instance, in the configure mode of the Dimensions view, a user with the Administrator role can modify and save the view configuration settings using the following buttons:
In edit mode, a Privileged User can modify and save the personal settings of this view using the following buttons:

You can view the generated multidimensional report using the view mode in the Dimensions view, modify the layout of the dimensions of the generated report, perform a drill-down to all levels of a dimension, and filter the generated report data.

Related concepts
View modes
Dashboards access control
Cooperative views
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) view
Scorecards view
Alerts view
Gauges view
Active Instances view
Reports view
Organizations view
Process Diagrams view
Export Values view
Related tasks
Configuring Dimensions view
Modifying Dimensions view visual appearance
Analyzing business measures against dimensions
Pivoting row or column dimension
Drilling down dimensional data
Administering dashboards and views
Related reference
Dashboards
Dimensions view reference
WebSphere Portal information
DB2 Alphablox

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