Has anyone upgraded to R12.6 yet? If so, what have been the benefits/advantages and the disadvantages you've encountered?

I've checked what is included in the upgrade but would like to know about your actual experience with it

We are already running on r12.6 since the weekend. Biggest advantage for us are the editable tables although we did not have time yet to test them properly  

Thanks Thomas, I saw that on the upgrade details and looks intriguing. Would love to hear how you get on once you do have time to test them 

As I read some comments here (especially from @Tony Wong) I want to add that we are in the middle of the upgrade from r11 to r12. As we are using this upgrade to clean up data/model/reports while we transfer only the most important stuff to r12 we have very little data in r12 so far (in comparison to our r11 instance). So our r12 instance is quite small right now but growing. So we did not have a lot to prepare for it.

tl;dr: If you have a fully grown r12 instance, read the comments below before thinking about an upgrade to r12.6. 

We may upgrade to 12.6 soon!

Although we have not upgraded to R12.6, I am leaning towards to wait until you hear from more community members what their experiences are. Since the last two upgrades, our experience is that the performance actually deteriorated over time. We are currently dealing with Apptio engineering group on intermittent performance issue which literally stop our ability to get into the system for a day on a weekly basis.

If the new features or fixes are not critical to your environment, I would hold off as long as you can. Apptio did apply a hotfix for us recently and it helped with the performance a bit. Perhaps check with them whether that hotfix would enhance for you.

We're currently on Version r12.5.1.1.0978dc9d4429.75801 and are due to be upgraded at the start of next month (the normal upgrade window is always during our month end cycle!!)

I've read the release notes (TBM Studio R12.6 and Application (v106) release notes ) and apart from the odd few I'm not sure if there's enough in there is warrant and upgrade just yet. We are rebuilding so might upgrade that environment and test the impact in there before we upgrade our main project.

Will definitely be a discussion needed with the team

One more note. In order to upgrade R12.6, one prerequisite is to upgrade any generated tables within your project to normal tables.-- https://tbmcouncil.jiveon.com/videos/2143. We had to convert over 40 generated tables in our projects. Afterwards, we were advised by Apptio with the following:

This is a follow up to the generated table conversion which required the addition of Model steps to many tables. The best practice of any Modeled Object is to set an object identifier. In the past, R11 required each and every object to have a selected object identifier. While this is not required for R12, it is a best practice and something that many of us in CS are pushing to have added back as a requirement in R12.

R12 behavior -- R12 allows for the Object Identifier checkbox to not be selected for ease of use. This is effective for customers with smaller data…basically there is still logic built in to create an identifier. However, this ‘default’ ID concatenates every COLUMN together. It can also grow in complexity based on the number of ROWS, and even the content of each cell (e.g. long strings of text can add complexity also…).

For any customer with generally large data, it is recommend setting an object identifier for each modeled object. Even if the object has no allocations in or out, Apptio still builds the object table for each model it exists in. Setting a simple object ID will ensure that this table is not too large, which can add time to the metric calculation time (e.g. the Cost metric).

Unfortunately the video did not mention that the model step is needed in order not to break any existing allocations, we spent quite a bit of time to clean up the model as a follow up with the conversion and now we also need to review all of the converted tables whether they have been set with an object identifier.

In summary, again take your time to prepare for R12.6 and don't get rushed into upgrading.

THANK YOU for this, Tony!!!!

Thank you @Wong Tony for detailed information! It is of great help!

Hi @Tony Wong,

Thank you for the information. I appreciate you sharing. @Michael Darragh� would this benefit our environment?

Shannon

We are on v12.5 but we started on 12. There wasn't that much difference for us. It depends on the functionality that is being used. At the time we were only using Cost Transparency. Hopefully someone else will chime in as well.

Tony this is great, thank you so much!!! We have a number of generated tables and without you mentioning it we would not have know. I think we may be holding off the upgrade

We have also upgraded, feels a bit quicker but not really tested that.  Overall not too many changes we take advantage of.  We are hoping that this does solve a few of our performance issues we were having but we will see.

One of the items that is less fun is the upgrade process to the new templates.  We are still on 104 templates and the process to 106 is quite a job.  I really wish this upgrade process could be improved.  Creating a branch and migrating back to the Trunk over a week or so is rather cumbersome and labor intensive.

Thanks Sandor, this is really helpful. I think we need to do a rec in regards to our generated tables to see what ones may be affected & then go from there. The Cloud updates will be helpful in the future (our CCM is standalone at the moment).

Think it will come down to timing as we have so much work scheduled for this year that doing the upgrade now may be the most logical time.

Hey@Julie Batty - so you're on R11 and have CCM in a separate environment running R12?  We may be doing the same for the time being.  Will be interested to see if your performance improves, too, @Sandor Welfing.  Bookmarking this one. 

We're on 12.5 & upgrading to 12.6 but there are a lot of enhancements/updates between the two.

Indeed...lots of changes for any shop using the bulk of CT's features. More so if you have custom elements.

I'm very intrigued with the Cloud features, but willing to delay or skip the 12.6 upgrade from 12.5...unless a priority use case inspires us otherwise.

Thank you, @Julie Battyand @Matt Temple!  We haven't done too much in our model w/cloud - mainly created a separate cost driver to send SaaS expenses directly to the supported applications.  Now we're beginning to get Pivotal data and will likely do the same for that.  No sense in getting fancy if we're on the verge of R12/HBM.

We upgraded to 12.6 since we encountered a known issue (In Apptio Dev environment, unable to view TBM Studio). The resolution was to either install a Hot Fix 9 or move forward with 12.6 upgrade which will eliminate the need to apply the hotfix, as R12.6 is already GA'ed and this issue was addressed. Ours was smooth and feels performance has improved. So far so good...

Thanks Yamini, that's helping to calm my nervousness around the upgrade

Girl YES!! 

Hi Yamini,

just saw this comment now and can advise when a client was upgraded to 12.6 I was also experiencing the issue of not being able to get into Studio. The issue appeared to be related to Chrome, and simply needed me to clear my cookies within the browser. All was good again after this.

Thanks Mark

So our upgrade has been postponed due to an error with DataLink. Hopefully this should be sorted this week and then we'll be on our way

We're on the "delay wagon", too.