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  • 1.  Clarity PPM SaaS Transition: Pre-Transition Activities

    Broadcom Employee
    Posted Mar 02, 2020 11:15 AM
    Edited by Christopher Hackett Mar 09, 2020 12:14 PM

    Welcome to the Clarity PPM SaaS Transition Blog series. This blog series provides you updates regarding the Clarity PPM SaaS transition to the Google Cloud Platform™ (GCP). In the first post, we provided an overview of the transition process and discussed the benefits of transitioning to GCP. 


    In this post, we will focus on pre-transition activities you and Broadcom will perform before any of your Clarity PPM environments are transitioned to GCP. Pre-transition activities can begin anytime but must be completed before your non-production Clarity PPM environment is transitioned to GCP.


    Activities Conducted by Broadcom

    • Broadcom has notified all Clarity PPM SaaS customers about the overall transition program..
    • Broadcom will issue a notification prior to the scheduled transition period, with additional information about the transition schedule for all of your Clarity PPM environments.
    • A Broadcom point of contact (PoC) will be assigned to you approximately one week before your non-production environment is scheduled to transition to GCP.
    • Some of the key activities your PoC will help with are:
      • Establish a regular meeting cadence with you to review:
        • Migration timeline
        • End-to-end migration process
        • Testing approach 
        • The impact on application URL, SFTP access, SSO, and HDP configuration.
      • The PoC will work with you to determine which non-production environment should be transitioned to GCP first.
      • The PoC will work with you to confirm you have reviewed  the transition documentation.
      • The PoC will work with you to confirm you have started building your functional and technical testing checklist.
      • The PoC will confirm you understand that Broadcom will access your transitioned non-production environment, for functional testing purposes,prior to the initial handoff.
      • The PoC will discuss your testing status during each scheduled meeting.

    Activities Conducted by Customers

    • Your organization will need to plan to allocate resources to test Clarity PPM following the transition of your non-production environment.
    • Please be prepared to provide information to your PoC, which includes but not limited to:
      • The non-production environment that would be transitioned to GCP first.
      • SSO IDP (Identity Manager Application Name) and setup information (URL and other information) if applicable.
    • Provide the PoC acknowledgment for the following; 
      • You have allotted testing time for the selected non-production environment upon handoff.
      • Should you complete your non-production environment testing sooner than planned, Broadcom can move forward the production transition date. 
      • You are prepared to execute your testing strategy and scripts. immediately upon the handoff of the migrated non-production environment.
      • You have reviewed the documents shared by the PoC ahead of the first meeting.
      • You understand that Broadcom will access your upgraded non-production environment, for functional testing purposes, before sharing the environment with you.
      • You will freeze any new development in your non-production environment and promote any existing development in flight to production before the transition process begins.
        • If the development work cannot be migrated to production before the transition process begins, Broadcom recommends creating off-line backup copies of the work. 
        • These development changes will need to be manually applied by you to the transitioned environment in GCP.
      • You understand Broadcom will begin the non-production transition based on a copy of your production environment.
    • Identify custom-built studio components by running an out of the box job "PPM Customization Discovery Analysis" in your environment. This job is available in Clarity PPM 15.x and higher versions. Ensure the job is activated prior to use. 
      • If you are using Clarity PPM 15.7 or higher, you can also run the Customizations Overview Jaspersoft report to list the content that is not included out-of-the-box with Clarity PPM. The report contains studio and database customization, including tables, views, functions, etc. 
    • Prepare the testing checklist
      • Generate a checklist that includes the following areas:
        • Functional area list
          • List of functionality leveraged in Clarity PPM. This list should be similar to the post-upgrade testing that is performed in your organization.
        • Technical list
          • NSQL lookups
          • NSQL based portlets
          • GEL Scripts with SQL
          • Jaspersoft content
            • Studio reports
              • NOTE: We recommend making a list of reports that are actively used only. It will save conversion and testing time by focusing only on reports being used.
            • Input queries
        • Additional component checklist (this list will be different for each customer)
          • Integration between third party application and Clarity PPM
          • SFTP usage
          • OData usage
          • SSO Implementation
          • Customizations
    • Prepare your internal team that will be involved in testing your non-production environment in GCP.
      • The list of resources involved will depend on the functional and technical areas to be tested.
    • Complete all development activities; including creating or enhancing custom components such as reports, GEL scripts and any other custom code -- at least two weeks prior to the scheduled start of the transition process.
      • Includes testing new development and migration to production.
    • If applicable, work with your PoC to update your internal environments,, with the following new information which will be furnished prior to the scheduled transition:
      • If IP address filtering exists within your organization's firewall, you need to update the firewall settings to allow inbound traffic from the external facing IP addresses of the Clarity PPM service in GCP.
    • Work with your PoC to ensure you have the ability to reach the GCP datacenter from your business network and perform the following tests:
      • A link will be shared that represents your geographical location. Please access that link with the browsers supported by your organization.
    • Work with your integration team to initiate an HTTPS call to the URL that will be shared for your region to ensure that inbound integrations to the service are also reachable. The URL tests will help you validate that you can access the GCP network from your network. 
      • If these tests are successful, then no changes are required to your network's firewall settings.
      • If any of these tests are unsuccessful, then IP address filtering is likely in use. Please engage the network administrator of your organization to update the firewall rules to white list the range for your region.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    1. Should we lock all active resources before the production cutover? 

    There is no need to lock all your resources accounts before the move to GCP. Doing this will create more work as you will need to reactivate these accounts in GCP. 



    1. What actions should we take with existing Clarity scheduled Jobs?

    We highly recommend that you pause all scheduled jobs in the current environment just before the environment cutover.  Ensure you allow any job that is processing to complete. 


    1. Is Broadcom going to move my SFTP files and structure over to GCP?

    No, You will need to backup your SFTP site, files and structure on or before your last day in the existing SaaS environment. You can then restore these files to the new GCP SFTP site. 


    1. What steps should a customer take before the move to GCP?

    You can take the following steps before moving to GCP:

    • Run the Post Timesheets job to post as many timesheets as possible.
    • Run the Post Transactions to Financials, Post to WIP, and Import Financial Actuals jobs to post financial transactions.
    • Review the Invalid Transaction portlet. 
    • Clear the jobs and log data.
    • Purge notifications (optional)
    • Review the Audit Trail Configuration and your organization's retention policy. In Classic PPM, navigate to Administration, Objects, "Object Name", Audit Trail Attributes tab and review the value in the Days after which audit records will be purged field. 
    • Remove unnecessary items from the production SaaS SFTP site.
    • Run the Clean User Session job. This job runs every four hours out-of-the-box. Ensure you run it before the move to GCP.
    • Check with your partner vendors if there are any recommended clean up actions for custom integrations, processes, or interfaces. 

    1. What are the first actions a customer should perform when initially accessing the newly provided environment in GCP?

    • Un-pause the time slice job first. Check the Administration, Data Administration, Time Slices portlet and ensure the Last Run date is set to the current date and time. 
    • Run the DataMart Extraction job. 
    • Run the Load Data Warehouse and Access Rights jobs. 
    • Run your sanity test case for example resource and investment counts. 
    • Un-pause the rest of the Clarity jobs. 

    Thank you for being a part of the Clarity PPM community. Please write to clarityppm.saas@broadcom.com in case you have any specific questions for us. The next blog listing out the transition activities will be published on March 9th. 

    #ca_clarity_ppm #gcp #clarityppmsaas


     



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    Thanks & Regards
    Suman Pramanik
    Sr. Principal Support Engineer | Customer Success & Support, Enterprise Software Division
    Broadcom
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  • 2.  RE: Clarity PPM SaaS Transition: Pre-Transition Activities

     
    Posted Mar 02, 2020 11:31 AM
    Thank you for sharing this update with the community Suman!

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    Chris Hackett
    Community Manager, Broadcom Enterprise Software Division
    Broadcom Inc.
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