Lifecycle Manager is an administration tool that allows administrators to migrate objects from one environment to another. The administrator performing the migration must be logged into Planning Analytics Workspace and have access to view the objects being migrated. Within Planning Analytics Workspace, Lifecycle Manager is accessed through the Administration page under your name on the Welcome page.
Both books and views can be migrated through the Lifecycle Manager, however, websheet migration is not currently supported. Therefore, if you are migrating a book from a source to a target environment, you will need to migrate the websheets manually. When objects are migrated to a target environment, they are placed in a new personal folder. This allows you to move the objects to a shared folder whenever you see fit. The diagram below shows the migration workflow used by Lifecycle Manager.
Asset Migration Workflow
There are currently several limitations within Lifecycle Management. As I identified above, the administrator performing the migration must have at least “view only” access to the object being migrated. At this time only books and views can be migrated, while websheets cannot. In cases where you are migrating a book with multiple missing databases, you will notice that the warnings for that book are not removed when the book is removed from the snapshot. Therefore, you will want to resolve any errors prior to the migration. Validation of a snapshot only looks at actively running TM1 databases. If you know the target database will be running soon though, you can migrate a snapshot that contains validation errors.
If there is a circular mapping of databases, all databases will be mapped to a single database. The number of objects that you can add to a snapshot will affect the performance of your model. There is a limit and IBM recommends keeping the number of objects to 100 or less to optimize performance. If the GZ file of an export/import of a snapshot is to large, you will get an “Import Failed” error message. When migrating a view using Lifecycle Manager, you will notice that the “modified by time” is updated while the “modified by user” is populated incorrectly. Additionally, the snapshot actions chart will show you records of the snapshot migration out and into the same environment. However, you will notice that only the snapshot migration out will show up in the log file. Migration of previously saved snapshots allows for the selection of a folder name in the target environment. However, when migrating a new snapshot, the snapshot name must be used as the new folder name.
Create Snapshot
The process of migrating a snapshot through Lifecycle Manager starts with creating the snapshot to migrate. To do this you will navigate to the Lifecycle Management page and click “Create Snapshot”. By default, the source environment is set to your current environment. Next, you will apply filters to select the assets to include in your snapshot. Once you have selected the assets to include in your snapshot, you will click “Add to cart”. Once you have added the snapshot to your cart, you will want to review the contents before migrating. Click “Review cart” and you will see the name, source folder, last modified date, modified by username, TM1 database source, and TM1 cube source of each asset to be migrated. Once satisfied, you will then click “Migrate” to save your snapshot and validate that the TM1 database is available in the target environment. If there are errors returned by the snapshot validation, you will see the “Database Validation” page open. Here you will want to review and resolve the errors before re-migrating the snapshot. When the snapshot migrates without errors, you will see it show up in a new personal folder with the name that you specified. From there you can move the snapshot to the desired shared folder for others to access.
Once you create snapshots to migrate to another environment, you can view these snapshots through Lifecycle Manager by clicking the “Manage snapshots” option. Within that screen, you can see all snapshots from the current source environment. Here you can apply filters or search within the list of snapshots to find the snapshot desired. The list of snapshots displayed are all snapshots created by any administrator. You can manage any snapshot in the list regardless if you were the creator or not. When you select a snapshot, you will see two tabs within the right pane. The “Snapshot content” pane contains information about the snapshot selected. This includes the snapshot name, creator, and description. Additionally, you can see the date/time of the last edits, how many assets it contains, and an action menu where you can choose from the different snapshot options. The “Snapshot logs” tab will show you all the actions that have been performed on the snapshot selected since its creation.
Database Mapping
Configuring the mapping of a database in your source environment to a database in your target environment allows for faster migration of assets. Each database in the source environment can only map to one database in the target environment. However, you can map more than one database in the source environment to a single database in the target environment. When you set up a database mapping when migrating objects to a target database that doesn’t exist, you don’t have to set the database in the target environment manually as the mapping you set up will be used. Whereas if you don’t set up a mapping when migrating objects to a target database that doesn’t exist, you will have to manually select the database. Lastly, when you set up a database mapping when migrating objects to a target database that exists and the mapping set up contradicts the database mapping, the objects are migrated as specified and the mapping set up is ignored.
Lifecycle Management
Lifecycle Management is a very useful tool that can save time and effort in migrations from one environment to another. This tool is also useful for validating and comparing the output of a report out of two environments. The diagram below shows how two sources push a report through Lifecycle Manager and generate results for comparison. This will help you validate the migration from one environment to another and in turn mitigate the risk of issues during a migration.
