Introducing the Pod Builder
Pod Builder is a WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) tool within the BMC Dashboards for BSM Administrator Console.
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It walks the BMC Dashboards for BSM administrator through the process of creating a custom pod by:
- Defining sources of data, such as relational databases or Excel spreadsheets and allowing BMC Dashboards for BSM administrators to aggregate and filter the returned data.
- Choosing the design of the pod including:
- Layout options such as side-by-side, one-up-one-down, etc.
- Charts selection such as bar, column, line, or pie charts. The full list of chart types supported by BMC Dashboards for BSM is available at the BMC Developer Network and .
- Publishing the pod to selected roles so that only authorized users, with the appropriate roles, would have access to the pod.
The case studies in the next sections illustrate how a typical customer (Calbro Services) may utilize the Pod Builder.
The following are the features of the Pod Builder:
Date display options for custom pods
The Select Options for the Chart dialog now contains new date formats which allow you to include only the month and year in the pod. The new formats follow, along with examples for each:
- Long - Month and Year: April, 2011
- Medium - Month and Year: Apr, 2011
- Short - Month and Year: 4/11
NULL values are displayed
In earlier releases, if the data source contained data category columns with NULL values for some records, the records were not included in the graphical chart components. Now, records with NULL values are included in the graphical charts. In the custom pod, if the category column with the NULL values is not enabled for user preferences, the records with NULL values are displayed with a category column label (on the x-axis of the chart) of [Null].
Though the records with NULL values are displayed in the pod, [Null] is not a selectable option on a chart breakdown menu. Also, if the pod is configured for interaction and any category involved in the data update contains a NULL value, the update will not take place. For example, if a custom pod is configured to interact to updates in the hostCompany column in the Service Impact and Availability pod, the custom pod component will not react if a service that is clicked on contains a NULL value for hostCompany.
Including records with NULL values allows for more precise calculations by the pod.
For example, including incident records with NULL values allows all applicable incident records to be included in the calculation for the total number of incident records.
Support for in-context cross launch to BMC Remedy Mid Tier or any custom URL from custom pods
You can now configure a custom pod to enable users to launch BMC Remedy Mid Tier or any custom URL (including BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management) from a grid view component, composite metric component, composite data grid component, traffic light component, and spark line component) within the context of the record displayed in the chart.
To configure the in-context launch for the grid view component, use the new tab In-Context Cross-Launch Configuration, which is available in the Select Options for the Chart dialog. Using this new tab, you specify the BMC Remedy Mid Tier URL or custom URL and the launch parameters. When the options are configured, the launch icon appears adjacent to the column value in the grid chart. You can click the icon to launch the URL in context. The following image shows the launch icon in a grid view component.
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To configure the launch for the composite metric, composite data grid, traffic light, and spark line components, assign a data column to the chart title in the design screen for the component, and configure the new tab In-Context Cross Launch Configuration. When the pod is previewed, the chart title will be a hypertext link that will launch the BMC Remedy Mid Tier or custom URL in context. The following screen shot shows the hyperlinked title for a sample composite metric component.
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