HIPPO - Informatica Overview

HIPPO is designed to put you in control of your Informatica estate by giving you an unrivaled understanding of the capacity and performance of your Data Integration platform and the database and server infrastructure that it interacts with.

·         Hippo is more than just monitoring tool. HIPPO is designed to be used by Informatica Administrators, Developers, Infrastructure teams and Support Engineers to enable them to optimize the productivity of their environment, improve the Power Center development lifecycle, distribute shared infrastructure costs accurately and maximize the return on their investment in Power Center. 

·         HIPPO allows Informatica users to monitor and analyze their entire Informatica environment, including production, test, development and grid environments all from a single web browser to focus on gaining efficiencies and improving business results. It does this by profiling how Informatica processes are performing and consuming resource: not just in terms of Informatica itself, but also in terms of CPU, Memory, Disk, I/O, Database performance and network latency.

·         HIPPO Visualizes your concurrency model & resource availability on a single screen enabling you to see which mappings run during periods of constrained and available CPU and Memory enabling you to make better scheduling decisions.

·         HIPPO’s single view of your Informatica estate means you can drill down from the operational “big picture” all the way to individual transformations, Mappings, Sessions and Workflows to understand their performance profile, resource usage trends and cost.

·         HIPPO’s great set of reports provide, for example, a project by project breakdown of usage costs across your Informatica environment, the identification of sessions which fail to meet performance thresholds such as CPU & Memory consumption, Time to First row and Caches which spill to disk.

·         HIPPO’s trend graphs over days, weeks, months and years reduce the likelihood and cost of production issues by providing advance warning of performance problems or opportunities early in the cycle.

·         HIPPO is the first tool of this new generation of applications to bring an Informatica focus to performance monitoring of Data Integration processes, environments and resource usage using data visualization techniques.

·         There was a discussion around, that we can also get most if the information from Informatica repository about session and performance, but after looking at tool reporting data, Only 25% of the information that HIPPO provides comes from Informatica and the remaining 75% comes from the Host CPUs, Memory, I/O, Storage and the databases that your Power center processes interact with.

How it works

HIPPO employs an agent-based architecture. Metadata is collected from the Informatica repository and from each of the nodes in your Informatica environment using HIPPO collectors. The HIPPO engine then correlates and analyzes this data and stores its findings in the HIPPO Repository. HIPPO presents its analysis via a web-based interactive user interface. There are over one hundred Charts and Data Visualizations in HIPPO accessed via twelve high-level menu options. Together they provide the most thorough analysis of an Informatica environment available on the market.

                                HIPPO provides a new and unique perspective on the productivity, capacity and performance of all of the components in your Informatica estate by analyzing and correlating data from Informatica, the Operating System, Memory, CPU, Network, Database and storage array to enable you to understand not just an individual session, workflow or project but also your entire estate. With knowledge comes the power to achieve the highest level of productivity from your Data Integration environment. Consider this example:

HIPPO’s Timeline feature allows you to easily link resource usage to the workflows or sessions active at that time. You can select the resource type, e.g. CPU or Memory, and filter your results by date, time or project to find bottlenecks or scheduling opportunities.

Technical Specification

HIPPO supports the same range of platforms supported by version 9.x of Power Center across Windows, Linux and UNIX. HIPPO ships with its own built-in Apache Web Server and Postgres database but can also be installed using your own installation of Apache (version 2.5 and above) and Oracle (version 10g and above). HIPPO requires just 500Mb for initial installation. The HIPPO engine can be installed anywhere in your environment and HIPPO will install a single java-based collector agent per Informatica node.

Assertive Software Ltd

Assertive was founded in the UK in 2010 to extend the capability of the common Data Integration toolset. HIPPO has been specially designed to extend Informatica’s Power Center product.