Having captured elements of your Enterprise Architecture in the Essential Architecture Manager repository, you can now view, report on and analyse this model using Essential Viewer. This tutorial introduces Essential Viewer and its key concepts.

Essential Viewer is a web application that is designed to provide everyone in your organisation with a suite of views and analysis reports about your Enterprise Architecture. Open your web browser and access the Essential Viewer homepage using the following URL:

• In Stand Alone mode: 

http://localhost:8080/essential_viewer

• In Multi User mode: 

http://<server>:8080/essential_viewer

Where <server> is the hostname of the server on which Essential Viewer has been deployed on your network.

At the homepage, Essential Viewer presents a set of 'Report Groups' which group reports and views together into related areas. By default, these are grouped by Enterprise Architecture process areas:

• Architecture Governance
• Project Delivery
• Architecture Strategy Management
• Architecture Standards Management

Click on the Architecture Governance icon and you will then be presented with a list of all the reports that are in that group. The list is broken down by architecture layer. Each report has a short description to help you find the one you need. As with the Report Groups, the Report List is controlled from within the modelling environment. For more information see the Managing Report Classifications tutorial. 

Scroll down to the 'Technology Archiecture Reports / Views' classification and click on the report called 'Technology Product Catalogue'. This provides a view of the catalogue of all the Technology Products that are in the Essential Architecture Manager repository.

You will then see a typical catalogue browser, showing all the Technology Products presented in an alphabetical order. Alternative views of this catalogue (as with many of the Essential Viewer catalogue views) are available using the links at the top of the page - 'by Technology Component' and 'by Technology Capability'.

Click on one of the products to bring up a detailed view of how that Technology Product is used in the architecture. (The amount of information in this view will depend on what is in your repository.)