Best Practices for MicroStrategy System Administration

MicroStrategy recommends the following best practices to keep your system running smoothly and efficiently:

• Use the project life cycle of development, testing, production to fully test your reports, metrics, and other objects before releasing them to users.
• If you need to delegate administrative responsibilities among several people, create a user group. A user group (or "group" for short) is a collection of users and/or subgroups. Groups provide a convenient way to manage a large number of users and provide them with certain privileges. MicroStrategy comes with a number of predefined groups for various Administration tasks. For more information, see About MicroStrategy User Groups.
• If you have multiple users working on a project with different functionality needs, utilize security roles. A security role is a collection of project-level privileges that are assigned to users. They can be used in any project registered with Intelligence Server and users can have different security roles in each project.
• Once Intelligence Server is up and running, you can adjust its governing settings to better suit your environment. For detailed information about these settings, see Tune Your System for the Best Performance.

  You can use Enterprise Manager to monitor various aspects of Intelligence Server's performance. Enterprise Manager is a MicroStrategy project that uses the Intelligence Server statistics database as its data warehouse. For information, see the Enterprise Manager Help.

• If you have multiple machines available to run Intelligence Server, you can cluster those machines to improve performance and reliability. See Cluster Multiple MicroStrategy Servers.
• Create caches for commonly used reports and documents to reduce the database load and improve the system response time. See Improving Response Time: Caching.

  Creating reports based on Intelligent Cubes can also greatly speed up the processing time for reports. Intelligent Cubes are part of the OLAP Services features in Intelligence Server. See Managing Intelligent Cubes.

• Schedule administrative tasks and reports to run during off-peak hours, so that they do not adversely affect system performance. See Scheduling Jobs and Administrative Tasks

  You can automate the delivery of reports and documents to users with the Distribution Services add-on to Intelligence Server.