Question is for Apptio Customers only....

• Our Business Users are asking for 11.8 upgrade, so that the new Benchmarking reports with Apptio Customer data can be consumed and used for analysis.  What best practices can you recommend from upgrade experiences?  I know the Apptio upgrade team publishes a 3 day upgrade timeline, but that is just the platform, and not any of the new content.  I would have to at a minimum upgrade the new benchmarking component, configure the new data elements, and enable the new reports.  I would like to also know if anyone has any time frame recommendations?

Thanks

Kevin Eichas

Keybank

I can only comment on the platform upgrade since I have been unable to work on the content upgrade due to bandwidth constraints.

Apptio recommends to move dev to the new platform on a Friday so that you can have two extra days of testing in Dev. Once test is completed in Dev, it is very doable to be in prod by Wednesday. I argue that two days to test in dev is not enough. The main factor here is the complexity of the model and the reports. A deep test of these two elements will take more than two days for a "simple" model. The trade off is how long can you afford to paralyze Dev to test in it. I can not do that for more than two or three days.

In my experience not conducting a complete test resulted in unpleasant surprises for my end users, and extended work in Dev after the upgrade to fix items that were not working any more.

Hi,

Thank you for sharing your inputs.

Does this mean, that we do not promote enable "Stage" to "Production" promotions when the Platform Upgrade is performed. Our challenge is about the Known Issues coming with the Upgrade which greatly impacts the TBM Studio, without being unsure on the impact and how to mitigate the impact , communicate to almost 120+ users on the mitigation plan seems to be a challenge within a 2-3 day window. Could you add some more light how to work through the TBM Studio Known Issues within a Platform Upgrade?

Thank you in advance,

Chaitanya Sirisilla

Hi Chaitanya,

This thread is about a prior version of our products, and does not apply to the current release 12.x architecture.

I wonder if @Jared Weidner from Apptio's upgrade team could comment on the recommended comparison test time? Particularly since another content upgrade is due soon.

Now I have the experience of a completed, successful, content upgrade. We're on 11.8!

We did it with the help of the Apptio upgrade team. It took us three weeks of freeze time, and another three weeks of prep time before that.

The outcome was satisfactory since we completed the upgrade without interruption of the service to our end users, all pre-existing use cases continued to work, and we got new content that we're now in the process of adjusting and enabling.

My only recommendation is to have close dialog between the lead TBMA and the upgrade team. The more the better. I'm not saying we were lacking communication, just that I whish we had even more, and go more into the hidden technical detail of the new content.