Once you have signed up for Oracle’s Business Intelligence Cloud Service (BICS) either via a trial or by purchasing a BICS subscription, the first thing that will happen is that you will get a couple of emails. The first one will tell you your cloud account details.
The second email, if you are the administrator, will give you a few more details on how to access and administer your cloud instance.
The main difference between these two emails and links is that the second one includes a link to details about your BICS instance instead of just accessing the instance. Let’s start with examining the second email’s link.
If we click on the “My Services URL”, after logging in, we are brought to Administrator’s dashboard. I’ve identified 14 areas that I want to address in this blog post before we even start created analyses for dashboards.
1. Although blurred out in my picture, this is the name of your BICS instance. This is unique to you and is how your instance is identified at Oracle and also in your BICS URL.
2. The type of subscription and date which your subscription expires.
3. Any associated services with your BICS instance. For example, we have a database service associated with our BICS instance. If I click on the database link, you will be brought to your details (we don’t have any to show).
4. The number of BI consumers that have logged in for each day over the past week. If you click the link, you will be brought to a dashboard containing the details of the users that have logged in.
5. The status of the instance over the past week. The colors associated are:
a. White: Before Activation
b. Green: Service Up
c. Yellow: Planned Outage
d. Red: Service Incident
If you click the link, you will be brought to a dashboard that has the details for status, including the future to show any planned outages for access planning purposes. You will also see details about the BICS service instance URL, domain SFTP, and service SFTP. You can also see details regarding Administration, Business Metrics, Associations, and Firewall settings.
Overview:
Administration:
Business Metrics:
Associations:
Firewall:
6. The number of BI authors that have logged in each day.
7. The percentage of time your instance has been available.
8. Details
9. This is where you can create users and assign roles and application roles. You can also take snapshots for backup/recovery and versioning purposes. You can also manage your database connection in this portal.
10. You can manage the users in this screen.
11. The list of notifications affecting your instance. This can be for Applications, Platform Services, and/or Notification Preferences.
12. If you click the down arrow, you will see a list of services. Only ones that you have purchases will actually show if you click on the application.
13. Quick Links
a. Preferences
b. Create Service Request
c. Change Password
14. If you click the hamburger, you will see other quick links pertaining to BICS.
We can see from the various images that many of the links lead to the same screens. As a BICS administrator, you will do your “administering” here. It is very straightforward and much simpler than in OBIEE!
RealTriGeek 
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