Hello,

I'm working on some potentially awesome data and reports that will require manual entry of data sets. The request was to use Apptio as a "survey tool" to collect data surrounding IT risk reporting. The stakeholder was impressed with the POC I built using a Form tool within Apptio, and some of the features surrounding visibility to ensure that only the proper audience was taking the "quiz." The individual was also a big fan of the fact that we could immediately report off of the responses, all within the same tool.

I'm a little bit troubled on best practices for doing something like this however. Currently, our data is not mastered in stage, so I would need to permit users access to my dev environment. Unless there are some other opportunities surrounding editable tables/forms which I'm unaware of? Looking for any input from users who have implemented manual entry in projects successfully.

Hi,

I have a couple of customers that use manual entry into data sets. We do however run into issues as the manual entries save to the USER audit log. This means it trumps all other audit logs for that data set I.E if you upload a new data set it will not show up unless you undo the user audit logs first.Something to think about when you designing the solution you are looking for.

Additionally this means it does not matter what environment you do this in but you need to remember with standard enforcement settings that the USER audit log is mastered in Prod.

Let me know if you need any clarification.

Thanks,

Lauren

Hi Derek,

There are a couple of approaches you could consider. You're quite right in that giving general users access to a DEV environment is not ideal.

Assuming that for whatever reason, mastering data in STG is not currently possible, you could nevertheless consider creating a snapshot project in STG for the purposes of running your forms entry. The snapshot will then sit outside of enforcement rules, enabling your form entry to work. Also, it's acceptable to calculate a snapshot in real-time, meaning that you wouldn't have to contend with the warm times of a normal project in the STG/PRD environments.

There are other possibilities, depending on your specific usage scenario. However, the best approach is largely dependent on the profiles of the users that may wish to run this analysis, and the frequency/response time/level of TBMA interaction that is required/acceptable in this scenario. In short, if you want them to be able to function with a degree of independence, they should be competent and trusted users anyway. If they are not pretty experienced with Apptio, I would imagine that you would want to oversee their activity to ensure that not only is data entered correctly, but also that the results delivered are interpreted correctly.

Hope this helps!

Regards, Ian.