Introduction
BigFix Insights is an application-driven extract, transform, and load (ETL) that helps you consolidate all the BigFix data into a single data warehouse.
Insights creates a view that automatically connects all your devices and BigFix data across all ETLed deployments. A Business Intelligence (BI) tool can then use the Insights database to create analytics and visualizations that help report on and reduce risks.
Insights provides an ETL that is capable of warehousing and aggregating data from multiple BigFix deployments. From this data warehouse, you can utilize business intelligence and analytics tooling such as Tableau, and Power BI.
Features and capabilities
Here is a list of features and capabilities that BigFix Insights offers:
- Import and combine data from BigFix Enterprise data sources into single data lake, with the data ready for report generation
- Provide a WebUI-based tool to manage ETL scheduling
- Use a BI reporting tool to offer ready-made reports that show data summaries grouped
by different criteria and historical trends. This includes a variety of
visualizations and dynamic filtering options to cover the following areas:
- Patch rhythm
- Device inventory
- OS migration
- Deployment progress
Technical Background
The BigFix Enterprise Server (BFEnterprise) Database contains information regarding your Fixlets, analyses, computers, sites, and properties. Data stored within the BFEnterprise database is stored in a denormalized format optimized to support the near real time platform capabilities. Insights ingests the information from the BFEnterprise Database (replica) and transforms this data into a standard normalized format. This format is optimized to support querying in SQL, reporting and servicing visualizations of important data across your organization. This document also outlines the schema associated with the BigFix Insights application.
Entitlement criteria
BigFix Insights is available as an add-on to any existing BigFix offering (Patch, Lifecycle, Start Kit, Compliance, or Inventory). For more details, contact your HCL account representative.
Architecture overview
The architecture shown above explains the infrastructure components of BigFix Insights. The BigFix Insights application is built on a MSSQL DBMS and uses the WebUI platform as its main application. The Insights application takes in structured data from one or more BigFix Enterprise Root Server Databases. To keep the BigFix Root Server platform running well and to reduce any possible impact on the application, the data is taken from a backup or replica (using T-Log shipping) of the BFEnterprise Database. Using a live BFEnterprise data source for ETL is not supported in the first release and should be avoided in all production scenarios. The Insights Datalake schema is documented and provides a standard format of the BFEnterprise Databases, allowing customers to use a BI tool to create reports.
In the first release, several reports are available in Tableau as examples of what can be done. Tableau provides many options for data visualization and has a strong user interface for creating and developing reports. However, customers can also use other BI interfaces.