SAP #BOBJ #BI 4.1 Upgrade Webcast Series 10: Promotion and Version Management

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Customer
SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.1 Upgrade Webinar Series
BI 4.1 Promotion Management and Version Management
Presenter: Matthew Shaw
Business Intelligence Architect, SAP
Twitter: @MattShaw_on_BI
Brought to you by the Customer Experience Group

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Customer
SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform 4.1 Upgrade Enablement
We bring to you all that you need to successfully upgrade to the SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform 4.1.
On SCN, you can find a BI 4.1 Upgrade Overview and other resources at: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-56525
Webinars will complement these published resources: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-56308

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Customer
Agenda
High Level Architecture
–Separation of environments
–Dedicated System for Promotion Management
–Promotion Management Architecture
–Version Management Architecture
Promotion Management Best Practice
–Promoting Content
–Ad-hoc Content
–Deleting
–Connection Mapping
–Lots more tips and advice

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Customer
Agenda
–Ad-hoc Content
–Deleting

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Customer
Validate content
Test security
Test software (support packs, patches etc.)
However, this presents a problem: How to manage moving content from environment to environment.
 Develop content (reports, universes etc.)
Verify changes
Why is Lifecycle Management Important? Basic principal, separate environments

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Customer
Why a dedicated system?
Promotion Management is really a ‘production’ system
It stores rollback content from a production environment which could be critical if a rollback is required in your Production system.
With the Version Management System it contains the versioning and an audit trail of your BI content allowing that content to be re-promoted or old content recovered. Could be critical to met compliance regulations.
Avoids potential issues when promoting content the ‘Promotion job owner’ does not have access to.
It’s really like any other production environment:
–Need to backup the system
–The ‘rollback’ content is stored as ‘instances’ in the output File Repository Server
–The ‘versioning’ of content is stored in version management, so you must also backup the version management database.
Promotion Management - High Level Architecture Why a dedicated system is recommended

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Customer
Additional benefits of a dedicated Promotion Management System
Allows for a refresh of ‘development’ and ‘test’ from ‘production’ without losing any Promotion Management specific data.
Allows for ‘de-coupling’ of software releases between Promotion Management and other environments.
–For example you can patch just Promotion Management without affecting Production.
–Allows for Promotion Management Server to be upgraded without necessarily upgrading Production. This could be important, for example you may wish to upgrade ‘Test’ before ‘Production’, but to be supported you need to also upgrade the Promotion Management Server

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Customer
Your ‘Promotion/Version Management’ server must be the same major version as the source and target systems. (i.e. all must be BI 4.x)
Differences of Minor Release and Service Packs are supported as long as the server where the Promotion Management Job is created and run is on the ‘greatest’ version, in this example the Promotion Management System:

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Customer
Promotion Management - High Level Architecture Recommendation for a ‘non-connected’ system (airgap)

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Customer
When a dedicate Promotion Management system is not available, then host Promotion Management on
Production (probably 1st choice)
Or Test (probably 2nd choice)
Or Development (probably last choice)
With Production being ‘better’ than Test; and Test ‘better’ than Development purely from the standpoint that Promotion Management should be considered mission critical.
Do not operate Promotion Management from multiple locations as this will be confusing and breaks proper control process.
Promotion Management - High Level Architecture Other possibilities for a connected system

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Customer
There are basically two workflows
Check-in. The creates a new revision of an object (like a document, or a universe) every time you check it in.
Check-out. This overwrites the version in the Repository with the revision you select.
What is Version Management? Basic version management workflow

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Customer
Only 1 Version Management System ‘container’ can only be used by 1 cluster (environment, ‘dev’, ‘prod’)
Each Version Management System ‘container’ has a set of ‘Working Directories’
Version Management - High Level Architecture Version management system

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Customer

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Customer
Agenda
–Ad-hoc Content
–Deleting

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Customer
A key basic principal for managing and promoting content is to Test in Test, before applying the very same content into Production
Promotion Management Best Practices Basic promotion management workflow

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Customer
If the test of that content was successful, we can then re-run the same promotion job, but we change the target to Production.
It is considered Best Practice to follow this workflow.
This is the same workflow adopted by SAP CTS+
Whilst we can easily change the target of a job, and re-run, it introduces a problem.
Promotion Management Best Practices Basic promotion management workflow

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Customer
Promotion Management – Best Practice Workflows Key principals

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Customer
It’s important we test the very same workflows that are to be applied to production in test.
Promoting content from Test to Production does not follow this principal and so it is considered poor practice.
The product is not designed for this workflow. If you follow this practice you will encounter issues.
Promotion Management Best Practices Considered poor practice

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Customer
Option 1: Use a ‘LCM BIAR’ file to materialise the content.
Promotion Management – Best Practice Workflows Key principals – using LCM BIAR files

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Customer
Option 2: Using VMS
Step 1: Create a job add it to Version Management
–Optionally check-in multiple times. Each time actually check-in all the content
Step 2: Check-out the job from Version Management
–Doing so changes the source from ‘Development’ to ‘Version Management System’
Step 3: Promote the job from Version Management to Test, then to Production
Promotions – Best Practice Workflows Key principals – Using VMS

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Customer
Demonstration
Promotions – Best Practice Workflows Using VMS to materialise content

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Customer
Best Practice recommendations
–Create a folder called ‘Templates’ and create ‘template’ Promotion Jobs in it
oOnly edit these jobs, never run/export or check-in these jobs
–Copy the ‘templates’ to a build folder and call it build 001, then build 002 etc.
oThese ‘builds’ are the ones you check-in/out or export/import
Promotions – Best Practice Workflows Organise, use templates and builds

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Customer
Managing Ad-hoc content
oAh-hoc content in production
oContent becomes ‘mainstream’
oPromote back to Dev, then back into Production
Promotions – Best Practice Workflows Managing ad-hoc content

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Customer
Promoting a ‘deletion’
oMove the content to be deleted into a ‘Deleted items’ folder in Development.
oPromote the content into Production.
oAs long as no one has access to the ‘Deleted Items’ the objects is as good as deleted.
Promotions – Best Practice Workflows Managing ad-hoc content

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Customer
Mappings Why use Mappings?
Just like all object types, create a connection object once.
Just because the connection (in production) contains different properties this is no reason to create a new connection object (with new CUID).
Tip! Don’t share connections across projects: To prevent one connection mapping interfering with another, define unique connection properties (user, pass, server etc.) for each Project on your BI Platform.

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Customer
Xcelsius/Dashboards
Use a relative address to
–Avoids ‘cross domain’ errors
–Removes the need to change the .SWF file between environments.
Simply, use a relative address in the Web Service URL, and the .SWF will work in all environments. All you need to move is the QaaWS objects themselves.
Mappings Dashboard Web Service

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Customer
Other Best Practices
Improving Performance
Removing the optional tasks will improve performance.
Removing the ‘rollback’ will improve the Job Promotion by 50%
Job Creation workflow is limited to web based timeouts (20 mins)

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Customer
Job Creation – CMC or Command Line?
Primary use case (promote developed content):
–Use the CMC to create the Promotion Job and add objects, manage dependencies
–Keep the number of objects within any one job to less than 5000. (5 thousand)
oFor product versions prior to BI4.1 SP2 this number is 100 (1 hundred) objects.
When promoting a larger number of objects:
–Use the LCM Command Line Interface
–Command Line will not suffer from any ‘web based’ timeout.
–Object selection is defined by a ‘query’ as there is no interface.
–So, it’s recommended to exclude ‘dependencies’ as this can result in a very large and unspecified number of objects being accidently selected

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Customer
Size and number of jobs
Don’t run too many jobs at once, this typically introduces confusion and ‘unknown’ rollback states.
Especially true when the same objects are being promoted in different jobs.
Consider setting the maximum number of concurrent jobs to 1 (default is 5)
Memory
When a job is run, all the objects are held within memory and thus additional memory may be needed to prevent large jobs from failing.
Increase the memory on the Adaptive Processing Server hosting “Promotion Management Service” by specifying –Xmx8g (for 8 GB of RAM).
Guidelines
–Around 10,000 objects will need 8 GB
–Around 16,000 objects will need 16 GB

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Customer
Organise
Organise promotion jobs in a folder structure that mimics production folder structure
Assign delegated administrators as desired
Use a consistent naming convention for promotion jobs
Do not promote
Do not promote security if it hasn’t changed
Security typically changes less often than content
Do not promote dependencies if they haven’t changed.
For example, universes change less often than reports
External Change Management ID
Use the ‘External Change Management ID’ to capture additional descriptions for that job so they can be viewed in the audit trail.
The audit database captures promotion and version management events. This includes the ‘External Change Management ID’ for the promotion event.

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Customer
Test Promotion
You can test what would happen without affecting destination
Always test promote to identify conflicts
Test Promote will inform you:
Of new objects that will be added
Any name or CUID conflict
If there are missing dependent objects
What mappings will be applied (For BI4.0 FP3 onwards)
Test promotion does not check for rights of the user on the folders in destination.
When to set the schedule to run
Schedule promotion jobs, when load is at is minimum

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Customer
Product support matrix
Objects support for Promotion & Version Management
Promotion Management Features
Dependency identification
Overrides/mappings support
Access the wiki at http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/x/QofBEg
Promotion & Version Management Support matrix

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Customer
Agenda
–Ad-hoc Content
–Deleting

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Customer
SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.1 Upgrade Webinar Series
BI 4.1 Promotion Management and Version Management
Q & A
Brought to you by the Customer Experience Group
Contact information:
Matthew Shaw
Business Intelligence Architect, SAP
Twitter: @MattShaw_on_BI

Appendix: Delegated Administration

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Customer
Delegated Administration Objective
Objective
‘Developer’ to create and edit Promotion jobs.
‘Developer’ to have NO access to Production, and NO update rights to Test.
‘LCM Controller’ to promote the jobs into Production, even though he/she has no access anywhere!

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Customer
Delegated Administration Security setup
‘Developer’ has only view access in Test and no update rights are granted in Test.
‘Developer’ can create new Promotion jobs under ‘Development Jobs’, but without a valid login that has update rights for the target, the job will never run and nothing can be promoted.

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Customer
‘Administrator’ creates a new empty ‘Dev to Test’ job.
Within the job the login details for both source and target are stored, but are not visible!
‘Developer’ can:
–Copy this ‘empty ‘Dev to Test’ job’
–Create a new job from this existing one, or just copy/paste the job to duplicate it.
Just by access to this job, enables access to the systems for those system credentials stored within it.

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Customer
Developer copies the ‘empty Dev to Test’ job into his project folder and adds objects to it.
Developer can not see the usernames/passwords set. However this does not stop Developer from editing or running jobs which can make changes, such as additions or edits, to the target, even though Developer does not have create or edit rights on the target!
Developer can setup a schedule to run his job on a regular basis to promote content from Development to Test.

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Customer
Developer checks Test environment and is satisfied that the job definition and the content of the source ‘Development’ environment is correct.
Developer moves his/her job(s) into the folder ‘Test Complete’.
LCM Controller is informed that a new promotion into Production is ready and required.

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Customer
LCM Controller can not do anything with the jobs held in ‘Test Complete’ folder except to move them to another folder.
LCM Controller moves the job from ‘Test Complete’ to ‘Accepted Jobs’
LCM Controller is denied the application rights ‘Edit jobs’, ‘Edit LCMBIAR’, ‘Allow access to Manage Dependencies’, so preventing any objects being added/removed from the job.
LCM Controller is denied the application right ‘Create Job’, so ensuring all jobs follow the standard process and no ‘ad-hoc’ jobs are created.

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Customer
‘Edit’ and ‘Schedule’ rights are required to test promote and to promote a job.
LCM Controller will need to edit the job to specify the target and, if using XI3, any connection mappings.
‘Edit’ and ‘Delete instances’ are granted so LCM Controller can edit and delete all instances, not just the ones he owns as ‘Edit objects that the user owns’ and ‘Delete instances that the user owns’ is inherited from the ‘Schedule’ role. ‘Edit’ and ‘Delete instances’ is required for rollback.

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Customer
LCM Controller changes the ‘target’ of the job from ‘Test’ to ‘Production’.
Access to ‘Production’ is specified:
–The LCM Controller enters the username/password for the user that will perform the promotion into Production. This user will need edit rights on the target, usually an administrator.
–OR, if using XI3, just opens an existing job that already has the ‘Production’ login credentials specified. Just like we’ve done for the ‘empty Dev to Test’ job, however we’re just opening the job, not editing it, so to gain access to the production system.

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Customer
LCM Controller runs the job and promotes content from Dev to Production.

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Customer
Developer can only view the jobs in ‘Accepted Jobs’, so once the job has run, Developer can inspect the job for success or failure and see the details behind any failures. Developer and/or other users can also query the audit database for a detailed audit trail.
Only LCM Controller can perform a rollback against Production

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Customer
Combine this workflow with:
•The ‘template’ and ‘build’ concept
•Materialising the job:
•BI4: The ‘check-in’ and ‘check-out’ with Version Management
•Check-out the job before moving the job to the ‘Test Complete’ folder
•Or, XI3 & BI4: within an LCMBIAR file
Delegated Administration

SAP #BOBJ #BI 4.1 Upgrade Webcast Series 10: Promotion and Version Management

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