SharePoint 2010 PerformancePoint Services : Maintaining a PPS Deployment - Managing PPS

To access the PerformancePoint Service Settings section, follow these steps:

1.	Browse to the SharePoint Central Administration site.
2.	In the section called Application Management, click Manage Service Applications. This displays a list of SharePoint Service Applications, as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1. Select the service application you want to manage from the list.
3.	Find the name of the service application you want to manage, and then click the link for the service application. This displays the Manage PerformancePoint Services page, as shown in Figure 2. Figure 2. You can manage the PerformancePoint Service Application Settings from here.

PerformancePoint Service Settings

The family of PerformancePoint Service settings can be accessed from the Manage PerformancePoint Services page by clicking the PerformancePoint Service Application Settings link.

For the most part, these settings offer controls to limit the performance impact of some of the more expensive operations available to you through PPS.

Secure Store and Unattended Service Account

Connection to the data source can occur through Per-User Authentication or, if this is not available, through the Unattended Service Account. The credentials for the Unattended Service Account are stored with a Secure Store Service Application, so they are not kept in plaintext within the SharePoint config database.

Comments

The Comments section, shown in Figure 3, controls limitations on comments across all scorecards. These limitations help control the performance implications of comments in scorecards. In scorecards, comments add a hit to performance, whether or not the comment is displayed.

Figure 3. Configure the Comments settings in this section of the PerformancePoint Service Settings screen.

You can configure the following settings for comments:

• Enable Comments: If you do not intend to use comments, best practice is to disable Comments completely by clearing the check box.

• Maximum Number of Annotated Cells per Scorecard: This limits the number of comments that can be placed on a single cell in a scorecard. The default is set to 1,000, which is probably more than you will ever need. Best practice is to reduce the default value to a more reasonable number. Too many unnecessary comments may slow performance.

• Delete Comments by Date: Comments are never automatically deleted from scorecards. The performance of scorecards may be impacted if you have a large number of scorecards with many comments on each, even if the comments are not displayed. Deleting comments by date removes all comments older than the date you specify.

Cache

The values you enter for the KPI icon cache, shown in Figure 4, control how many seconds a particular custom indicator is cached. This applies only to custom indicators, as the default indicators are always cached.

Figure 4. Configure the cache settings in this section of the PerformancePoint Service Settings screen.

You should never need to change this value as potential performance gains are minimal. However, you may want to change this value in a deployment where many large custom indicators are used in production. Increasing this value allows PPS to do a more aggressive job of caching the custom indicators and results in a slight performance improvement. The downside is that changes to the indicators result in a delay for the changes to the indicators to take effect.

Data Sources

The Data Sources setting, shown in Figure 5, is a PPS setting that determines how long a particular query may run before timing out.

Figure 5. Configure the data sources settings in this section of the PerformancePoint Service Settings screen.

Filters

The family of settings for filters, shown in Figure 6, primarily applies to the user experience of filters on a deployed dashboard. The Remember User Filter Selections For setting specifies how long the filter settings apply when specified here.

Figure 6. Configure the filters settings in this section of the PerformancePoint Service Settings screen.

In addition, it is possible to control the maximum number of members that will be returned in a filter. Doing so proves useful when users are working with large dimensions such as time. It is also useful if users select a flat dimension, which could have a significant performance impact on the server.

Select Measure Control

This setting, shown in Figure 7, limits the number of measures that can be returned when a user attempts to add more measures to an analytic chart or grid on a dashboard.

Figure 7. Configure the Select Measure Control setting in this section of the PerformancePoint Service Settings screen.

Analytic charts and grids are flexible enough that designing may occur on-the-fly. For example, while viewing an analytic line chart displaying viewers per episode, a user may also want to add an additional line to the chart displaying revenue per episode. If the data source has more than the maximum number of measures specified, it will truncate the number of measures displayed to this value.

Querying for measure information can be an expensive operation in terms of performance and will result in long loading times. This setting enables you to manage for performance. Change to a higher value if you have data sources with more than 1,000 measures. Change to a lower value if you have smaller cubes, but it is important to note that changing this value has no practical effect unless the number of measures in a cube crosses the limit you set. In addition, setting this value to 0 effectively disables the ability to add measures to analytic reports.

Show Details

There are two settings available under the Show Details heading, shown in Figure 8. The Initial Retrieval Limit setting governs how many rows are returned when a user first accesses the show details functionality. For example, if the retrieval limit is set to 10 rows, only 10 rows at a time display when a user requests a show details report, even if there are more than 10 rows to be returned overall.

Figure 8. Configure the Show Details settings in this section of the PerformancePoint Service Settings screen.

After the completion of the initial retrieval, a user may retrieve more rows if the data is what is expected. In this case, the Fixed Limit setting controls how many rows will be returned in subsequent retrievals. There also is an option to have the limit controlled by Analysis Services, which uses the Analysis Services limit, which is controlled by the OLAP\Query\DefaultDrillthroughMaxRows server property.

Decomposition Tree

The decomposition tree visualization is a new feature in PPS 2010. If your users will be using the decomposition tree visualization frequently, best practice is to limit the number of items that can be returned, to help limit the performance impact on the data source. The setting for this is shown in Figure 9.

Figure 9. Configure the Decomposition Tree settings in this section of the PerformancePoint Service Settings screen.

If you drill down to a level of a decomposition tree that has more items than this setting, for example a date dimension with 1,000 members, PPS retrieves only the top 250 members of this dimension instead of retrieving and subsequently displaying all members of this dimension. This enables users to page through the top 249 members in the dimension. Other members will be shown as Bottom 751 as an aggregated value not directly accessible to the user through the decomposition tree visualization.

If in this same example you change this setting to 10, the user can see only the top 9 members, and the other 991 members will be aggregated as Bottom 991. If the user wants to see the smallest values first as opposed to the top values, the bottom 9 values will be shown as the Top 991.

Trusted Data Source and Content Locations

For enhanced security, a PPS service application can further lock down which objects are available for use by a user. In the case of data sources, a list of trusted data source locations enables an administrator to restrict the ability for PPS to use a data source that is not explicitly located in a trusted location. If a user does try, PPS denies access and gives an error message indicating that the administrator has denied a data source from that location. In the case of other PPS objects, access can be restricted in the same way with trusted content locations.

This feature mitigates against malicious user attacks that take advantage of the unattended service account to create their own data source list in a site or site collection that they have access to and where they can potentially elevate their privileges to view data that the unattended service account does have access to. For trusted content locations, the malicious user could use existing data sources and create their own KPIs that would expose some of that data that an administrator might not want exposed.

This can apply to data sources or to PPS content lists, which include key performance indicators (KPIs), scorecards, indicators, and reports. This family of settings enable you to secure data sources further. They also enable you to access content by clicking either Trusted Data Source Locations or Trusted Content Locations on the Manage PerformancePoint Services page.

Best practice is to configure these settings when you run the Unattended Service Account as a highly privileged account with broad access to sensitive data (for example, human resources or financial data). Best practice is also to restrict any data sources that can be used for that service application to one specific data source list with tightly controlled permissions.

You can grant trust to site collections, sites, or document libraries. This trust used in conjunction with restricting write access to these trusted locations through SharePoint security allows all users to take advantage of configured data sources while protecting data from inadvertent changes. It also takes advantage of elevated permissions through the Unattended Service Account.

Configuring a Trusted Data Source Location

When you configure a trusted data source location, lock the data source for the service application to one specific SharePoint list.

To configure a trusted data source location, follow these steps:

1.	From the PerformancePoint Service Settings page, click Trusted Data Source Locations.
2.	Change the radio selection from All SharePoint locations to Only Specific Locations, and then click Apply. Caution After you perform step 2, all data source locations will be inaccessible to PPS users until you configure all specific locations.
3.	Click Add Trusted Data Source Location, as shown in Figure 10. Figure 10. Click Add Trusted Data Source Location from this screen.
4.	Enter the full URL of the data source document library that can be accessed by PPS users, and then click OK (see Figure 11). Figure 11. Enter the name of the data source document library on this screen.

When you complete this configuration, only data sources within the list of trusted locations will be available to users of Dashboard Designer and to previously deployed dashboards. Data sources outside the list of trusted locations will not be available to these users or to the dashboards.