Red Hat Training

A Red Hat training course is available for Red Hat Decision Manager

Chapter 1. Planning the installation

Before you begin installing Red Hat Decision Manager, there are many options that you should consider. Review the information in this chapter for an overview of the installation options and components that work with Red Hat Decision Manager.

1.1. Red Hat Decision Manager components

Red Hat Decision Manager is made up of Decision Central, Decision Server, and Red Hat Business Optimizer.

  • Decision Central is the graphical user interface where you create and manage business rules.
  • Decision Server is the server where the rules and other artifacts are stored. Decision Server is used to instantiate and execute rules and solve planning problems.
  • Red Hat Business Optimizer is a lightweight, embeddable planning engine that optimizes planning problems.

1.2. Installation options

Depending on your environment and project requirements, choose one of the following installation options:

Note
  • Download and run the executable JAR installer for installation on Red Hat JBoss EAP 7.1 or Red Hat JBoss Web Server 3.1 with Tomcat 8. The installer graphical user interface steps you through the installation process.

  • Download one of the following ZIP file installations. The ZIP file installation does not require a graphical user interface so you can install Red Hat Decision Manager using SSH.

    • To install Red Hat Decision Manager on Red Hat JBoss EAP 7.1, download the following files:

      • rhdm-7.0.0.GA-decision-central-eap7-deployable.zip
      • rhdm-7.0.0.GA-kie-server-ee7.zip
    • To install Decision Server on Red Hat JBoss Web Server 3.1 with Tomcat 8, download the rhdm-7.0-kie-server-jws.zip file.

For more information, see Red Hat Decision Manager 7 Supported Configurations.

For installation instructions, see Chapter 2, Installing Red Hat Decision Manager.

1.3. User roles

The following user roles are available with Red Hat Decision Manager:

  • admin: Users with the admin role are the administrators of Red Hat Decision Manager. Administrators can manage users, manage, create, and clone the repositories, and have full access to make the required changes in the application. Users with the admin role have access to all areas within the system. Before you can use Decision Central, you must create a user that has the admin role.
  • analyst: Users with the analyst role have access to all high-level features to model projects. However, Authoring → Administration access is unavailable to these users. Certain lower-level features intended for developers, such as the Deployment → Artifact Repository view are not available to this role. However, the Build & Deploy button is available to users with the analyst role while they are using the Project Editor.
  • kie-server: Users with the kie-server role can access Decision Server (KIE Server) REST capabilities. To log in to Decision Server, you must create a user that has the kie-server role.
  • rest-all: Users with the rest-all role can access Decision Central REST capabilities.

For more information, see Section 2.3.3, “Creating users”.

1.4. Supporting tools

The asset repository, Apache Maven, Red Hat JBoss Developer Studio, and Red Hat Business Optimizer each perform an important function by integrating with Red Hat Decision Manager.

1.4.1. Asset repository

Business rules and other assets and resources created in Decision Central are stored in the asset repository, which is otherwise known as the knowledge store.

The knowledge store is a centralized repository for your business knowledge. The knowledge store connects to the Git repository to store various knowledge assets and artifacts at a single location. Decision Central provides a web front-end that enables you to view and update the stored content. You can access the content by using the Project Explorer from the unified environment of Red Hat Decision Manager.

All business assets are stored in repositories.

1.4.2. Apache Maven

Apache Maven is a distributed build automation tool used in Java application development to build and manage software projects. You can use Maven to build, publish, and deploy your Red Hat Decision Manager projects. Maven provides the following benefits:

  • The build process is easy and a uniform build system is implemented across projects.
  • All of the required JAR files for a project are made available at compile time.
  • A proper project structure is configured.
  • Dependencies and versions are well managed.
  • The is no need for additional build processing because Maven builds output into a number of predefined types, such as JAR and WAR.

Maven uses repositories to store Java libraries, plug-ins, and other build artifacts. These repositories can be local or remote. Red Hat Decision Manager maintains local and remote maven repositories that you can add to your project for accessing the rules, processes, events, and other project dependencies. When building projects and archetypes, Maven dynamically retrieves Java libraries and Maven plug-ins from local or remote repositories. Doing this promotes sharing and reuse of dependencies across projects.

See Section 3.1, “Using the Maven repository in your project” for instructions on configuring Apache Maven.

1.4.3. Red Hat JBoss Developer Studio

Red Hat JBoss Developer Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) based on Eclipse. It integrates tooling and runtime components by combining Eclipse, Eclipse Tooling, and Red Hat JBoss EAP. Red Hat JBoss Developer Studio provides plug-ins with tools and interfaces for Red Hat Decision Manager. These plug-ins are based on the community version of these products. For this reason, the Red Hat Decision Manager plug-in is called the Drools plug-in.

For more information about Red Hat JBoss Developer Studio, see Section 3.3, “Installing and setting up Red Hat JBoss Developer Studio”.

1.4.4. Red Hat Business Optimizer

Red Hat Business Optimizer is a lightweight, embeddable planning engine that optimizes planning problems. It helps Java programmers solve planning problems efficiently, and it combines optimization heuristics and metaheuristics with efficient score calculations.

Red Hat Business Optimizer helps solve various use cases, for example:

  • Employee/Patient Rosters: It helps create timetables for nurses and keeps track of patient bed management.
  • Educational Timetables: It helps schedule lessons, courses, exams, and conference presentations.
  • Shop Schedules: It tracks car assembly lines, machine queue planning, and workforce task planning.
  • Cutting Stock: It minimizes waste by reducing the consumption of resources such as paper and steel.

Every organization faces planning problems. They provide products and services with a limited set of constrained resources (employees, assets, time, and money). Red Hat Business Optimizer helps Java programmers solve constraint satisfaction problems efficiently. It combines optimization heuristics and metaheuristics with efficient score calculation.

For more information, see Installing and configuring Red Hat Business Optimizer.

1.5. High availability and clustering

High availability describes a system or component that is continuously operational, or available, for a desirably long length of time. You can measure availability relative to the unattainable value of 100% available, or never failing. A common but difficult-to-achieve standard of availability for a system or product is known as "five 9s" (99.999 percent) availability.

High-availability (HA) clusters are groups of services that can be used with a minimum or no down-time. Without clustering, if a service crashes or is too busy, the user asking for that service will not get a quick response. With high availability clustering, mulitple nodes provide copies of data and services. A service watchdog detects a failure on one node of the cluster, restarts the failed node, and simultaneously switches service to another node. In most cases the failure is not visible or noticeable to the user.

See Chapter 4, Clustering with Red Hat Decision Manager for design-time development environments for information on how to set up a high availability cluster with Red Hat Decision Manager.