OPTIC Reporting gives you a cross-domain, end-to-end view of your IT estate for specific roles in your organization. With that broad visibility, you can find and prevent problems faster.

This post is primarily about Operations Bridge (OpsBridge), our AIOps platform, but Network Operations Management (NOM) and Data Center Automation (DCA) also use OPTIC Reporting. Later we’ll see how they play together.

OPTIC Reporting was introduced with Operations Bridge 2021.05. OPTIC (Operations Platform for Transformation, Intelligence, and Cloud) is a set of common services used by Micro Focus ITOM software. In part, it is a rebranding of Collect Once Store Once (COSO), but it covers more than COSO did.

Figure 1. OPTIC functional diagram. Components used by OpsBridge are shown in blue, and OPTIC Reporting components are in red.

Click to enlarge images.

OPTIC Reporting Components

OPTIC Reporting (which includes dashboards) has two components: Business Value Dashboard and the OPTIC Data Lake.

Business Value Dashboard (BVD)

BVD is a visualization engine initially designed for dashboards and was later enhanced to do reporting and be interactive. BVD can show data from other sources, such as video feeds in real-time, RSS feeds, and more.

OPTIC Data Lake

OPTIC Data Lake is where we put the data collected from all sources—OpsBridge, NOM, DCA, and third-parties (OpsBridge consumes data from 200+ third-party sources). The unification of data is how OPTIC Reporting provides the end-to-end view I mentioned above.

The data lake is built using Vertica, a columnar database that is particularly fast for the IT Operations use case. Use case-specific interfaces for data ingestion and access were built around Vertica.

Having all your data in one place also allows for deeper analysis. For more on that topic, check out this post—Anomaly detection and metric analytics on OPTIC Data Lake.

How to Get Started with OPTIC Reporting

As you might guess, to get started you need to have the OPTIC Data Lake and BVD. These components are containerized so they can be installed on premises or in AWS or Azure. They are also deployed and available in Operations Bridge – SaaS.

Figure 2. OPTIC Data Lake with data sources. 

Once the components are installed, you need to feed data into the data lake. In Figure 2, you can see a small sample of the data sources. (See the OpsBridge Integration Brochure for the complete list of third-party data integrations.)

Once the data is available, you can choose from a list of BVD templates on the Micro Focus ITOM Marketplace. On the left, look for reports, dashboards, and management packs (which include reports for their domain).

Reporting Capabilities

Beyond the templates, dashboards and reports are easy to build using Microsoft Office Visio. Reports can be built for any organizational role. You can also create reports using your business intelligence tool (Bring Your Own BI/BYOBI). Figure 3 shows a report created using a BI tool on the left (the one shown is Power BI, but we support many BI tools), a typical report in BVD in the middle, and a typical stakeholder dashboard using BVD on the right.

Figure 3. OPTIC reports for various roles—IT and business people—in an organization.

I mentioned above that you can combine NOM and DCA data with data from OpsBridge, and you can combine any data in the data lake on a report or stakeholder dashboard. Figure 4 shows data from NOM combined with data from OpsBridge—presenting the complete service view needed to find and prevent problems.

Figure 4. System, application, and network data on a dashboard with links to reports. 

Figure 5. A combined view of DCA compliance violation data with OpsBridge data can alert operations staff to potential compliance issues.

You might be wondering why you would want compliance data merged with other monitoring data. What if the vulnerability is causing a problem? Knowing that piece of information might help detect the problem faster.

Figure 6. Power BI report with data from OPTIC Data Lake.

We’ve shown how OPTIC Reporting brings flexibility in deployment, visualizes data in ways best suited for the intended audience, and gives you a choice of visualization tools (BVD or your BI tool of choice).

You’ll find guides to using your own BI tool, the OPTIC schema, and other papers in the related items below. 

RELATED ITEMS

• On-demand Introducing OPTIC Webinar
• Operations Bridge Bring Your Own Business Intelligence (BYOBI) guide
• Operations Bridge OPTIC Data Lake schema
• Operations Bridge Reporter (OBR) to OPTIC Evolution guide
• Network Operations Management BYOBI guide
• Network Operations Management OPTIC Data Lake schema
• OpsBridge-NOM Composite Report
• OpsBridge-DCA Composite Report

Events

• On-demand: Universe 2022 Solve Your Digital Dilemma
• On-demand: Operations Bridge Gets SaaS-y—and More Powerful
• On-demand: Operations Bridge – SaaS
• On-demand: Cloud Monitoring Virtual Customer Forum

See all the Micro Focus events worldwide.

Read all our news at the Operations Bridge blog.