Pentaho® Solutions: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing with Pentaho and MySQL®

Chapter 11. Deploying Pentaho Data Integration Solutions

As you learned in the preceding chapters, during the design and development phase, the Pentaho Data Integration (PDI) solution is executed mainly using Spoon. After the development phase, the data integration solution is typically moved to a server environment, either for further testing or for production purposes.

On the server, transformations and jobs are usually not launched using a graphical user tool such as Spoon. Instead, steps are taken to provide automated execution. Depending on the requirements of the data integration solution, execution may be scheduled or driven in a continuous manner by some background process. At any rate, the administrator must act to take the solution out of the development environment to put it to work on its target platform. We refer to this process as deployment.

There is more to deployment than installing the software and setting up automated execution. Measures must be put in place to allow system administrators to quickly verify, and if necessary, diagnose and repair, the data integration solution. For example, there must be some form of notification to confirm whether automated execution has taken place. In addition, data must be gathered and examined to measure how well the processes are executed. We refer to these activities as monitoring.

In this chapter, we provide an overview of the features and tools you can use to organize deployment, and to monitor your PDI solution. The aim of ...