Top 3 Challenges of a Hyperion 11.2 Upgrade

Oracle Hyperion is one of the world’s leading application suites for enterprise performance management (EPM), helping tens of thousands of customers around the world run cutting-edge analyses of their business processes and uncover hidden insights.

Yet with the great power of Oracle Hyperion also comes great responsibility—in particular, the responsibility to upgrade your Hyperion deployment at regular intervals. This is especially important now due to the upcoming end of support of Hyperion 11.1.x in December 2021.

In this blog post, we’ll discuss the three most common upgrade challenges companies face when completing an upgrade. If you’re ready for solutions, jump to the end for a valuable resource you can download today.

Challenge #1: Performance Testing

Performance testing is the process of determining how a software application or infrastructure performs in response to established input. Application performance management (APM) heavily depends on performance testing: whereas APM seeks to understand and resolve the source of a software application’s performance issues, performance testing helps uncover these issues in the first place.

The types of performance testing include:

• Baseline testing to see how an application performs under normal load
• Stress testing to see how an application performs under abnormally high load
• Capacity testing to determine the number of possible concurrent users and/or transactions
• Longevity testing to see how an application performs after running for an extended period of time
• Regression testing to verify that recent changes have not affected an application’s performance

Using performance testing during an Oracle Hyperion 11.2 upgrade is essential. Hyperion is both a highly complex and vital component of your business processes. If the upgrade substantially impacts your Hyperion performance, you need to know and swiftly fix the issues, so that you aren’t left with post-upgrade regret.

Challenge #2: Minimizing Downtime

One of the reasons why businesses postpone their Hyperion upgrades as long as possible is because of the downtime that they’ll have to undergo. The longer your systems are down, the less productive and efficient your employees may be and the greater the potential for lost profits. While the impact of downtime can sometimes be lessened by scheduling tasks around the workweek, this often isn’t an option for national or global organizations with offices scattered across different time zones.

Often organizations even choose to undergo downtime voluntarily as a “solution” to root cause analysis during or after an upgrade—if all else fails, just try rebooting the machine. However, rebooting causes a ripple effect in terms of inefficiencies and lost productivity and doesn’t actually help you identify the underlying cause of a performance issue.

Challenge #3: Performing Root Cause Analysis

While we’d all like to imagine that our Hyperion upgrade will go as smoothly as possible, this is rarely the case in reality. And when things do go wrong, you need to diagnose the problem efficiently and take immediate action. That’s where root cause analysis (RCA) comes in. RCA is a term describing the tools and techniques for identifying the underlying cause of a problem or performance issue.

Hyperion unfortunately doesn’t come with good RCA tools out of the box; in many cases, users are only alerted to a problem once the service or application has already failed. Trying to put out fires during the Hyperion upgrade distracts system administrators from their work and delays users from regaining access to the tools they need for their jobs.

If you’re a seasoned Hyperion manager, these top three challenges are familiar; if not, you have a peek at what’s to come. But it’s not all bad news. To learn how Datavail can help you overcome these top three challenges, download our white paper, “3 Ways Datavail’s IP Can Jumpstart Your Hyperion Upgrade.”