Authors – Ramakrishna J Gorthi (rjgorthi@in.ibm.com) & Vaibhav V Gadge (vaigadge@in.ibm.com)
Identity Governance and Intelligence (IGI) allows enterprises to provision, audit and report user access and his activities through life cycle, compliance and analytics capabilities. While one of the core functions of IGI revolves around Access Certification / Continued Business Need, there are some key performance improvements in Access Certification performance.
All ongoing campaigns are usually listed on Access Certifier Summary Page. This page is the most frequently visited page for approvers in many enterprises using the product. Having said that, enterprise wants the response time of the AC Dashboard as fast as possible so as to quickly launch different campaigns and complete the actions there. The requirement is all the more critical for Supervisors who need to drill-down into multiple campaigns to get a feel of what’s going on there.
The same aspect applies to Campaign Details Page as well. Enterprises do want to ensure a good response time for traversing the different views within a campaign, perform bulk actions etc.
There are some provisions available in IGI 5.2.5.1 using which one can improve the response times of not just Access Certifier Summary Page, but also the drill-down pages. They are explained below.
Improvement 1: Performance improvement in the Access Certification Summary Page
As shown in Figure 1:
- Login to IGI Admin Console.
- Open Access Governance Core → Settings → Core Configurations
- Uncheck the checkbox “View Statistics for Access Certification Campaign”.
- Save changes.
Figure 1. Setting to enable on-demand progress display in Summary Page.
When approvers login in Service Center with this configuration and open Access Certifier Summary Page, the two columns “Review Progress” and “Signoff Progress” will not show up with statistical data, rather just an icon as shown in Figure 2. Approvers can view the statistics by simply clicking on statistics icon.
Figure 2. Icon serving as trigger to display statistical information, on-demand.
Statistics will show up as user clicks on icon, as shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3. Display statistics when the icon is clicked.
Improvement 2: Performance Improvement in Campaign Details Panel
A similar performance improvement can be achieved in Campaign Details page in User View. The difference in configuration, as you can guess, would be that the configuration would be specific to individual Campaign. As shown in Figure 4, admin can always enable or disable progress bar visibility and statistics of approval and rejections in any campaign using “Show Certification “Progress Bar” checkbox in Campaign Details Panel in the Admin Console.
Figure 4. Campaign specific statistics display control
Based on this configuration, progress bars in the “Review Progress” and “Sign Off Progress” columns will appear only if this check-box is checked. It’s important to note that the user can always get the statistics, by clicking on the statistics icon as show in Figure 5. That way response time will be faster.
Figure 5. Statistics Icon in the Review Progress column, in User View.
Once you click one of the icons here, the relevant statistics would be pulled up for the user, as shown in Figure 6.
Figure 6. Progress statistics, after clicking on a specific icon.
In view of the performance improvement, the campaign statistics have been moved out to the Campaign Information popup panel that you see when you click on the Campaign Name, as shown in Figure 7. That way, the statistics need not be refreshed real-time, hence some saving on some CPU cycles. However, customers still have a choice to see these details in the face of the campaign, by using the “Show Certification Progress Bars” configuration. If this option is checked, then the details would be available at the top of the Campaign Details Page as well as the Campaign Information popup. If the switch is turned off, the statistics would be shown in the Campaign Information Popup only.
Figure 7. Display statistics on Campaign Information Popup panel.