Start here
The Operational Decision Manager documentation is long and comprehensive. Your role in using the product determines your starting point.
This documentation covers two sets of components:
- Operational Decision Manager: Enables businesses to respond to real-time data by applying automated decisions. With it, business and technical users externally develop and manage the decision logic of operational systems that organizations depend on daily.
- Operational Decision Manager on Certified Kubernetes: Minimizes the security concerns some organizations have about public cloud services and gives you direct control over your data. You create and provision multiple machines, change computing resources on demand, scale applications, and take advantage of a self-service platform.
Development and implementation rely on two groups of components:
- Decision Server Rules: Primarily for developers, you use Decision Server Rules to develop, deploy, and run decision management applications in Rule Designer and Rule Execution Server.
- Decision Center: Used by developers and business users, it provides a collaborative environment to author and manage decisions.
Your role and objective determine where to begin in the documentation. The following starting points are recommended.
Installer
Each set of components has installation and configuration requirements.
- Operational Decision Manager
- If you are responsible for setting up this product, start with these sections:
- Release notes: See what's new and what's deprecated. Also, check for additional information about accessibility, best practices, compliance, and known limitations.
- Installing: The installation guide describes how to install Operational Decision Manager on a local machine or network.
- Configuring: After installing Operational Decision Manager, you might have to configure Rule Execution Server and Decision Center on a supported application server.
- Licenses and metering: Your product license gives you access to various components and features. After you install the components, you can monitor your usage through the IBM®® License Metric Tool (ILMT) tool.
- Upgrading and migrating: Upgrade your components by installing the latest version. Then if necessary, migrate your existing repositories to the databases of the upgraded components to apply the latest features.
- Operational Decision Manager on Certified Kubernetes
- If you are responsible for setting up this product, start with these sections:
- Release notes: See what's new and what's deprecated. Also, check for additional information about accessibility, best practices, compliance, and known limitations.
- Installing ODM charts on Certified Kubernetes: You create a Kubernetes environment and install Operational Decision Manager.
- Installing Rule Designer: You must install Rule Designer into an existing instance of Eclipse. As a rule developer, you work in Rule Designer to create decision services that use rules to implement your business logic.
- Upgrading ODM releases on Certified Kubernetes: To upgrade to a new version of Operational Decision Manager, you need to upgrade the ODM Helm chart.
Developer
With Operational Decision Manager installed, you use Rule Designer to define the language that is used to write business rules for your organization. You create decision services, test them, and deploy them as RuleApps to Rule Execution Server. You can also publish decision services to Decision Center to develop them further in an online collaborative environment.
Start by visiting the following sections:
- Overview: Decision Server Rules: Provides development and runtime components for a rule-based solution that automates the response of highly variable decisions required by client applications.
- Tutorials: Get hands on with Rule Designer and Rule Execution Server. No previous knowledge is needed to do the tutorials. They take you through the whole process of developing and deploying decision services. The tutorials prepare you for defining the rule languages, authoring and debugging rules, and running RuleApps with client applications.
Business user
Decision Center includes the Business console, a shared online environment for collaborative development. Through it, business users directly contribute to the development of decision services.
Start by visiting the following sections:
- Overview: Decision Center: With the Decision Center Business console, business users can author and manage decisions that are directly based on organizational knowledge and best practices, with limited or no dependence on the IT department.
- Tutorials: Work directly in the Business console. No previous knowledge is needed to do the tutorials. They take you through the process of developing and deploying decision services in a governed environment. The tutorials prepare you for working on the rules, authoring and debugging them, and deploying RuleApps for use with client applications.