Hyperion Myth #8: Production and Non-Production Environments are Difficult to Keep in Sync

With countless applications under its umbrella, Oracle’s Hyperion suite of business process management and business intelligence software is complex enough before you introduce different environments into the mix as well. Unfortunately, many Hyperion customers find that keeping these different environments and servers in sync isn’t just a difficult task, it’s also hard to put back in place when things go wrong.

You’ll be happy to hear, however, that there’s an easy fix for these problems. If you’re used to painfully and manually resolving discrepancies between environments, Datavail’s Application Performance Management (APM) software platform, developed by Hyperion experts at recent acquisition Accelatis, will be like a breath of fresh air.

The Myth

The 8th myth in our series claims that production and non-production environments are difficult to keep in sync. Any non-trivial Hyperion deployment is going to have multiple environments, such as development, testing/quality assurance, and production. This isn’t just for fun, of course; each separate environment is necessary in order to separate concerns and properly manage the software.

What’s more, each of these environments could have many servers associated with it, further multiplying the complexity. When these servers and environments get out of sync, you’ll likely observe issues with stability, speed, functionality, and performance. For example, a process that runs slowly in a development environment may run slowly in production – and often for no discernible reason.

Unfortunately, trying to find the source of these issues can sometimes feel like a fool’s errand. When two or more servers are out of sync, you might have to compare potentially tens of thousands of settings manually, which is obviously a painstaking and highly frustrating task.

The Mythbuster: Datavail’s APM Software Platform

The good news is that Datavail’s APM software for Hyperion isn’t just for monitoring and alerting; it can perform more complicated tasks as well. As soon as you install it, we can give you the features that your IT team needs right out of the box: automated documentation and change history, and synchronization of servers and environments.

Many organizations are reluctant to use root cause analysis as an IT troubleshooting technique because comparing environment settings manually is a laborious task at the best of times. Our platform does all of this for you, removing these pain points and making it possible for organizations to use RCA. Even better, it can monitor your environments and generate alerts when it detects changes, so that you don’t have to go hunting for them after the fact.

One of Datavail’s clients used our software to resolve a long-standing mystery about its different Hyperion environments. The client observed that groups of production reports were slower than in the QA environment, even when both environments had the same hardware and application data. Once we installed our APM product, the client quickly discovered that the reports were out of sync because an employee had been adding member lists to the definition. They were then able to mitigate the problem, retrain the employee, and avoid the issue in the future.

Final Thoughts

With the help of Datavail’s platform, organizations no longer have to go on a scavenger hunt just to find out why they’re experiencing performance issues in different environments. Detecting discrepancies and changes between environments and servers automatically is just one of the many benefits of investing in Datavail.

For more detail on how to debunk this and 8 other Hyperion myths, download our in-depth white paper: 9 Hyperion Myths That Are Making You Less Effective.