pentaho CDE CDF CDA CD* tutorials

Quick post to help people trying to make stuff on those great tools developed by webdetails.pt . They are great but have a lack of docs, so this two links would help:

http://www.vinzi.nl/media/CDE-introduction_V0_8.pdf
http://www.tikalk.com/incubator/blog/creating-bugzilla-dashboard-%E2%80%93-hands-cde-tutorial-%E2%80%93-fuse-day-3-session-summary

I got those links in IRC ##pentaho channel on freenode btw

PD: If you want to install CDE in a context path different to /pentaho/, keep in mind that uri is hardcoded in all js and templates files of the pentaho-cde-dd directory

Messing with Roo

In the last Google I/O was anounced that GWT 2 will have support in Spring Roo. I never heard of Roo before and I wanted to take look (http://www.springsource.org/roo).

It seems that Roo improves the development by maintaining all the interfaces, stubs and glue code that is boring when you use GWT or Entities.

I just ran two of the demos...a classic Spring Controller Roo Project with handling the CRUD of a Concat entity (http://s3.springsource.com/MRKT/roo/2010-01-Five_Minutes_Roo.mov):

And a GWT integration handling the CRUD of an equipment (http://www.thescreencast.com/2010/05/how-to-gwt-roo.html)

So far  it was pretty impressive to make an entity based application in 5 minutes without all the glue code, but as this is a new concept I wonder if anyone has done any real large sized project supported in Roo....

Render a Prpt report correctly in a Pentaho's BI Platform xaction

Hi, a quick hint about writing a Xaction who must render a Prpr Report. If you try to use the xaction writing plugin for Eclipse, the xaction probably wont work. Here is the correct xaction, and you should overwrite the xaction with this in Eclipse (changing the prpt name of course):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<action-sequence>
  <title>Test report in PDF format</title>
  <version>1</version>
  <logging-level>TRACE</logging-level>
  <documentation>
    <author>Emmanuel Guiton</author> 
    <description>Generates a PDF test report.</description> 
    <help/> 
    <result-type/> 
    <icon/>
  </documentation>
  <inputs/>
  <outputs>
    <test_report type="content">
      <destinations>
        <response>content</response>
      </destinations>
    </test_report>
  </outputs>
  <resources>
    <report-definition>
      <solution-file>
        <location>test-report.prpt</location> 
        <mime-type>application/zip</mime-type>
      </solution-file>
    </report-definition>
  </resources>
 
  <actions>
    <action-definition>
      <component-name>SimpleReportingComponent</component-name>
      <action-type>Test report</action-type>
      <action-resources>
        <report-definition type="resource"/>
      </action-resources>
      <action-outputs>
        <outputstream type="content" mapping="test_report"/>
      </action-outputs>
      <component-definition>
        <outputType><![CDATA[application/pdf]]></outputType> 
        <useContentRepository><![CDATA[true]]></useContentRepository> 
        <paginate><![CDATA[false]]></paginate>
      </component-definition>
    </action-definition>

  </actions>
</action-sequence>

Hope this help.

Latest CDF - script.js minified

Hi,
Just a quick post about the latest CDE-CDF etc that the guys of webdetails have been developing. As In the previous version, distributed in Pentaho platform, I had to tweak a little the javascript of the Map component, I wanted to do the same in this version.

You'll notice a new js file called script.js. That's a minified js generated when the server is started. If you need to twek the js and test you'll have to add this to the dashboard's url: &debug=true&bypassCache=true

Hope this helps anyone else

Aberrant Behavior Detection

As I wrote before, most of the time of this year I worked in Network Management Systems. Managing a huge, constantly growing, network is a heavy task. One part of this task is measurement collection, and for this task we use Cacti, which a powerful visualization and rrd graphics template tool.

Cacti as others open source measurement collections systems rely the data storing and charting in the RRDTool software.

In our Cacti instances we are collecting measurements from 15000 different router/cmts interfaces, which includes common measures like bandwidth, cpu, memory and others not so common like SNR, Cable Modems in the upstream, modulation profile.

As the NOC is unable to watch and control this amount of charts, there is a nice functionality, not widely used, in the rrds: Aberrant Behavior Detection (ABD). ABD adds a set of measurements and algorithms that adapt to the seasonal trend of the chart and detects when a current value is too deviated from the expected value. You can read about the mathematical details here and here.

You can see some examples here:

The classic bandwidth measurement

Cable Modems in the upstream channel

You can write a short Perl script to check if there is an aberrant behavior in the rrd and do something about about it (for example, send a trap or a syslog with the alert). This way you add a great feature to the network management tasks.

Back to Pentaho again

So, this year I have been spending most of my time digging in Network Management Systems both open and closed source. Think on Net-SNMP, SNMPTT, NAGIOS, CENTREON and you will get an idea. I promise i'll post more about this because is such an interesting topic.

Lately I have been with free time so I went back to Pentaho and discovered huge advances in the community ecosystem. Specially Pedro with CDF and Tom with Pat (erm now called Haiku).

As my boss wanted to show the quality status of our customers in a map, what I did was to use CDF with openlayers and open street maps. With some adjustments to the CDF's js libraries (the marker layer) I changed the presentation to render a circle with a color scale and whose size depends on the number of clients in the xy position. Here is the result:

Isn't open source software nice? :-)

User Defined Java Class (UDJC) step

Hey!, I saw the flash recording demo of the new plugin developed by Daniel Einspanjer, User Defined Java Class UDJC and the performance improvement of the Kettle PDI Transformations are awesome. Now Matt Casters is including it in the source tree of PDI 4.

Click here to see Matt's post.
Click here to see the awesome demo.