CDC (Customer Data Compare)

What is CDC

CDC is Apptio's internal automated validation tool. CDC is used both in the process of developing new server versions of the flagship product, as well as validating customer's data between server versions before a server upgrade takes place.

CDC uses 2 internal temporary deployments of a production customers recently backed-up data so the comparison is completely disjointed from the customer's actual instance. IE running a CDC job will not impact a customer whatsoever.

The Process of a CDC run

A CDC deployment begins with selecting a customer's production deployment, as well as a target server version. CDC imports information from AWS and our datacenter to populate available customers to test and what version those customers are on. Then by selecting a target version CDC will know the customer and the 2 builds to compare.

Next, the user must select a LAYER for CDC to run. By design CDC does not compare all information in a customer's instance; it only compares the data selected via the LAYER. There are 3 layers that can be selected individually:

·      Model Tables

·      Table Transforms

·      Reports (this layer is a work in progress, at this time it is non-functioning)

For the sake of validating customers for upgrades the Model Tables layer is selected, since almost all report values are created from modeled values and allocations.

To Initiate a CDC run please provide the following details to the upgrade team via the Apptio_Upgrades-dg@apptio.com alias:

·      Instance URL (ex: "aig-r12.apptio.com")

·      Project Name

·      Version (optional, only if the customer has requested not to go to the GA)

The Final step of running a CDC job is to select a project within the customer's web node, which we can find using the instance url. Since in individual CDC comparison can potentially include gigabytes worth of data individual runs are limited to 1 project. This could potentially change in the future but for now 1 CDC run will cover the selected layer data in a single selected project. Validating for a customer's upgrade to a new server version typically means we only run the customer's largest project in the majority of cases. That being said, there are cases where we have run multiple CDC runs to cover customers with multiple large projects in a single instance. We can also set the target version here for the compare, however in almost all cases this defaults to the GA.

Results

There are 3 possible conclusions of a CDC run:

Run Failure

Differences Produced

Pass

Run Failure occurs when CDC is unable to complete comparison. This can happen for a multitude of reason ranging from random hiccups in the network to bad customer configuration. One of the greatest challenges CDC faces is the coverage of customers, since all of the customers use Apptio in different ways. Upon a Failure condition a ticket can be manually filed to the CDC team so they can investigate the cause of failure.

Differences Produced: This result is produced when CDC finishes its comparison between builds and finds differences somewhere in the data of the selected layer. It then produces a file that can be investigated by the user outlining the differences found.

Pass: This result is produced when CDC finishes its comparison and does not find any differences between the 2 instances. This is the desired result, as it implies the customer will have no changes upgrading between server versions.