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Preparing for development in Planning Analytics as a Service

By Paul Hart Prieto posted Mon October 21, 2024 05:11 AM

Prepare PAaaS for Development

IBM Planning Analytics as a Service is extremely flexible. In order to start development of your models and business logic it is recommended that you create at least one, logically separated area for each development team. this could be one area if all development is performed by one team or multiple areas if, for example, each business unit has their own needs ie, HR separate from Finance.

The steps consist of:

Create a Development Environment
Create the initial Development Database
Invite Developers to the environment and give them access to the database

Create a Development Environment:

Environments are containers for your databases and users.
An environment could be a separate area for development, User Acceptance Test (UAT) etc. or for separate functions ie. A Finance production environment for only Finance users and a HR Environment for HR Headcount planning etc.
This allows for a logical and secure separation of function and data access.

In this case we will create one called CSM-Dev for our development environment, but you can choose any appropriate name or simply “Development”.

Start by logging in to the Planning Analytics as a Service Workspace.

Note: you can find the url to your PA Workspace on the IBM SaaS Console by selecting your instance under subscriptions and then selecting "Launch". It is advisable to bookmark the url to your workspace instance as this is also the url you will share with users of IBM Planning Analytics.

Once logged in:

Select the Administration tile	Select Environments tile	Select "Add"	Name the Environment as select the type (in this case, Development)

Congratulations, now that you have completed these steps you have your first development environment.

You can now use the Environment "Selector" in the top right corner of Planning Analytics Workspace to change to the new Development environment for the following steps. Simply select the dropdown on the Environments selector and choose your new development Environment.

For documentation on managing environments please see: Manage PAaaS Environments

Create the initial Development Database

The next step is to create a database for your development work.

A Database is a collection of Cubes with their respective dimensions, business rules and processes.

The Database will hold all your business logic and data and you normally have a database for each subject area such as Financials or HR talent management.

To start, Ensure you have your development Environment selected.

Select the Administration tile	Select the Databases tile	select "Create"

You are now presented with a form:

Database name: choose something that is relevant for your project ie. "Financials dev"

Replicas and High availability (HA): Planning Analytics as a Service has HA built in. It means that if a database suffers an issue and is down another copy of the database (replica) can continue to function. Selecting the "High availability" checkbox enables this feature and the replicas entry. The replicas allow you to specify how many active copies of the database are required ie. with replicas at 1 you will have a total of 2 copies of the database running (the initial database and the replica). Setting this to 3 or 4 allows for more resilience should there be failures however, it is important to note that each replica consumes RAM ie. a database that is 2GB of RAM in size and has 2 replicas will consume 6GB of RAM from your quota in total.

Disk Space: is the amount of disk that you wish to allocate to the database storage including files and backups etc.

RAM: is the amount of RAM allocated to the database

Automatic Backups: In Planning Analytics as a Service, backups can be taken manually or automatically. Turning on Automatic backups ensures a backup of the database is taken at the time selected and is recommended. Backups can be downloaded and restored to other databases or restored directly to the current database ie. restore the data and model for this database to this mornings automatic backup as at 1 am.

Once your development database is created, it can be selected and you can see the:

Details: current RAM usage, start/stop the database, manage (alter RAM and replicas/HA) as well as upgrade to the latest version of the database software.
Activity: to view the current activity on the database
Configuration: to change configuration parameters that impact areas such as calculations, performance and external database (ODBCIS)
Backup: here you will find backups, download and restore them.

Congratulations, you now have your first development database.

To learn more about creating and managing a database please see the documentation: Managing a Database

Invite Developers to the environment and give them access to the database

The final step in preparing your development environment is to invite the developers to the environment and grant them access to the database.

To invite a user to the environment:

Select the Administration tile	Select the Users and Groups tile	Select "Add" on the Users tab

You will now see a form for the new user:

Fill out the users First name, Last Name and Email address. Note: the email address should ideally be their corporate email address.

For the Role, select an appropriate role for the developer (usually Modeler). For more information on user roles see: User Roles

and select "Add" to finish adding the user.

At this point, the end user/developer you have invited will receive an email:

The user/developer can now access the environment using the link in the email (or the system link you share with them).

Note: If a user is invited to more than one environment ie Production, UAT and Development then they can use the same link and switch environments using the selector (top right corner) mentioned earlier in this blog.

If users are not seeing the invitation email you can aske them to check their spam/junk folders as well as ensure that emails from: service@saas.ibm.com are not blocked.

At this point, you have added your first developer to Planning Analytics. You can now continue to add more users to any selected environment using the same process.

At this point you can now check the settings for a user by selecting the users name in the Administration -> Users and Groups screen:

From here, you can suspend as users access as well as change their role (User Roles).

You will also notice that there is a switch at the bottom of the page "Environments admin privileges", enabling this for a user allows that user to create additional environments and is a power user right.

The final step is giving the new user/developer security access to you new development database and any workspace assets.

This can be done using the individual user however it is best practice to use groups to minimise administration overhead.

To create a group:

Under Administration -> Users and Groups. select the Groups tab (next to users) and select create.	Give the group a name ie. Developers and then select create

Once the Group is created. at the bottom of the page (with the group selected) you will see the "Manage" button. select this to add users.	You will now see a list of users already invited. Select the users you wish to be a part of the group and then Save the selection.

Now that your Developers group has been created you can add and remove users from it using the Manage button in the future.

The next step is to set up security in Planning Analytics Workspace. Folders can follow any naming and sub levels you wish. It may be that you want the content that is created separated by function or by group etc.

By default, everyone has access to the shared folder content in Planning Analytics Workspace and newly created folders and content inherit their permissions. This will not be covered in this blog directly as it is not required for the base development environment at this time.

If you have a need to secure workspace assets in development, you can see how to set permissions using the new developer group or for individual users in the documentation: Set asset permissions

The Final step is to add the developer group to your development database.

Database Security in Planning Analytics is group driven. You can assign a group with different capabilities such as read or write for Cubes, Dimensions, items in a dimension ie, a user in the group can only see their country or non HR users cannot see Salary info etc. Security is even possible at an individual cell.

To add the Developer group to the database:

Open a new Plannning Analytics Workbench	In the database tree you can expand your database to view objects. On the actual database (in this case "Dev" select the three dots that appear when you hover over and then select "Manage users and groups" from the Menu.

In the bar above the security view you will see several icons. The + icon adds internal database groups while the person icon adds users. Select the icon representing multiple people. This is for adding Planning Analytics Workspace groups and will also automatically add current users in those groups.	Select the group or groups you wish to add by selecting it. In this case, the developers group you created. Then select the blue "Add" button at the bottom right of the dialog box.

You will now see that the group has been added and a green tick will appear in the intersection of the group and the users who are in it. At any point you can right click on a user, group or intersection and assign or unassign membership of the group manually. For example, another developer may wish to test security so you can unassign them from the developer group and assign them to another group to test. The other developer should log out and upon logging in will have the new groups permissions. Tip: at any point if there are browser caching issues you can use incognito/inprivate browser modes so a clean cache is used.	Finally, IF at any point there are changes to the group membership (remove or add users to workspace groups) you can right click on the group and select "Synchronise group" to update the database security.