Good Morning TBM Community,

At my company, we really utilize the concept of What if's with in Apptio.  To elaborate, when new scenario arises, we create a snapshot of our Cost Transparency project and manipulate the data based on the business requirements.  Then we use the report comparison feature to provide how the what if impacts the cost of our services.  We usually do this in our stage environment because that environment as our latest data.  We now use forecast data in our models to predict the cost of our services for a few fiscal year out.  This new reporting has spawned a lot of What if requests.  Recently we had started to notice performance issue in our stage instance and I'm guessing that it might be related to take several snapshots.

Does anyone have any best practices to share on this matter?  For example using Dev instead of Stage (this causes problems for us since we usually have some new reports in the hopper or some other change that might make this difficult to manage) Or how long do you keep snapshots, do you ever reuse snapshots and just undo the audit log?

Thanks for any ideas or suggestions,

Jeff

Having a lot of snapshots definitely will impact performance - we've seen it ourselves.  We try and keep ours cleaned out as much as possible.  How many what-if snaps do you have to have in play at one particular time?  You could definitely use one and undo the audit logs, but that gets cumbersome (I would think personally).  Our snapshots are usually in there no more than a month I would say - we use them to test a new idea, run the before/after, get our reviews/approvals, and then once we move it to the live project, we delete the snapshot. That's just us, though.  Glad you posed the question - looking forward to other responses!

Agree. Generally, I keep the number of snapshots to a minimum...usually a few at any time.

Ignoring snapshots will lead to a lot of stale projects being built up. Administratively burdensome when trying to decide which ones to delete later.

Hi Jeff,

To add to what Jenny and Matt said, I'll add that best practice is to create snapshots in DEV. I'd also recommend using a very clear naming convention for snapshots (JS 8/12/16 Labor What-if). Using a well defined naming convention will make the process of deleting old/unused snapshots more efficient since you will know exactly why/when the snapshot was created by simply glancing at the name.   

I hope that helps!

I'm very interested in the What-if scenario methodology. Thank you for sharing your take on it. I would be interested in following up with you to learn more about it.

We had performance issues a few months back for unrelated reasons. We "de-coupled" our environments and that really made a huge difference specially for Stg. On the down side it took some re-training for data loading and env promotions, but worth the effort if you ask me.

Me, too - wondering what all data and/or allocations are added/removed as part of the what-if - if that's what's occurring.  We had a what-if project one time where people were able to change percentages, but it's not used any longer.  May ask your support person about a separate project specifically created for what-if analyses.  The only downside to that is that you have to keep it updated so it becomes part of your monthly project copy process.