Key takeaways:

• Pulse is a tool designed to help developers and administrators in their day-to-day tasks.
• Pulse provides valuable information and features for tracking user activity, monitoring process performance, estimating restart times, and identifying object relationships.
• Pulse allows users to go back in time and analyze historical data for troubleshooting and identifying patterns or trends.
• Pulse enables users to share information with TM1 users, improving testing and troubleshooting processes.
• Pulse offers features such as migration tracking, rollback options, and the ability to identify object dependencies.
• Pulse has been proven useful in optimizing processes, resolving issues, and improving system performance.
• Pulse version 6.3 introduces new features such as an improved overview page, integration with Atv, live migration of subsets, custom links, and an approval feature for package migrations.
• The Pulse Explorer tool allows users to visualize the data stored in Pulse in a more interactive and intuitive way.

(disclaimer: this transcript has been automatically transcribed so it may contain errors)

Okay. Hey everyone, my name is Maciej Majer. Welcome to Horizon 2023. Today I have the pleasure to host a session by Vincent Viau or Vincent if I would try to pronounce his name properly, during his day-to-Day Activities is looking over the whole portfolio of our Cubewise code products. Today, though he’ll focus on Pulse and hopefully share with us some of his secret techniques that will allow you to get most of out of the latest features of Pulse 6.

Vincent, the floor is yours. All right, thanks Maciej. Alright, I’m going to share my screen and I’m sharing now. Hello. Hi everyone, my name is Vincent and I’m coming live to you from France. So yeah, message, thanks for hosting and yeah, please feel free to, ’cause I can’t see the question so if if there are any questions please you can post them on on the chat and I will be very happy to answer them as we go so it’ll be more interactive.

So yeah, please ask questions. So I’m going to very start quickly by introducing Pulse ’cause maybe some of you might not know already. Pulse, we can see there are quite a few attendees. So I’m just going to start by quickly explaining why, why Pulse exists basically. So why Pulse? Pulse is there to help developers and administrators through their day-to-day job.

And as an administrators or TM1 developers, I’m sure you will be facing or you will have faced these type of questions. Like for example, if you want to know who was logged in yesterday, even last week and what were user doing or something else, which is very common is when you want to run a process, if you need to run a process, you want to know how long it might take. If this process is taking longer than it used to be, than it used to, you can go back to Pulse and see what was happening and why this process took longer. Yeah, another question that happened to me quite often is when you need to restart a TM1 instance, it’s not that easy to know how long is it going to take.

So because Pulse is recording all the previous startup time of the instance, you can go to a person, see how much this instance might take if you, if you need to restart, especially if it’s production, you want to know if it’s going to take 10 minutes, 20 minutes or one hour or even more sometimes if you’re not lucky. And something else which is interesting is for example if you’re working with Dimensions and they’re used in processes or in rules, you want to know where this element is being used. So you can ask Pulse, because Pulse keeps all the relationship relationships between your objects. So you can tag the name of your object in the search is going to give you the list of rules and processes where this element is referenced.

So the mission of Pulse is really dedicated to administrators and developers as well because yeah, most of the time the developers are also administrators. So the idea is to be able to be knowledgeable and proactive that will give you the complete confidence in your system. So I like to see Pulse as if you, I hope you know X-Men and in X-Men, this guy Professor Xavier and when he put his helmet he can see everything. So it’s really, I like this idea of when you enter Pulse then Pulse give you lots of information and we have now lots of new features in Pulse that can help you to dive into this, into this data to quickly see what you want to what you want to understand. So if you have a questions like we were like we, like I was saying before, you can quickly get the answer with Pulse.

So if I just split into three section about the no, no about the knowledge that Pulse gives you. So what Pulse does it’s records, it track everything that’s happening in your system and it stores it in a very powerful database. You can get the documentation that is creating on the fly. So with the current, your current, the current state of your system and but observability it’s, it’s beyond monitoring. So with monitoring you see what is happening with observability. Now with Pulse you see second by second what happened, it’s even better. So anything that happens second by second, like yesterday a week, 10 days a month, you can go back in time and see everything that was happening. So being proactive. So we have a lot of customers that they are sharing Pulse because Pulse is many a web clients so it’s just one UI.

So you can share it with your TM1 users and if your TM1 users think there is something slow that is happening, they can go to Pulse and see by themselves. They don’t need to ask you or reach out to the TM1 support team and asking is, is anything happening? They can go there and check by themselves. So you have alerts.

You can also improve your testing because with Pulse you can exactly see what your users have tested before you can migrate it to production and there is a lot of features on the migration to give you the confidence like for example you can do migration live without having to restart your TM1 instances Pulse keep track of all the changing that happen. There’s even a rollback feature.

So if you do a migration and then you realize that you did a mistake, there is a rollback button which is going to remove the changes that you just just done in your instance. Alright, so yeah, I like this, this gif because the first one you could see it as monitoring, you can see that someone who is, they know there is an issue, they don’t really know exactly where or how it’s going to when it’s going to happen. So it is just looking around, it’s not very efficient. But on the right it’s observability where you have the tool that can give you the answer very quickly. So you see when you have Pulse you are more like Homer Simpson. So Pulse 6 yeah, maybe just very quickly some, yeah some key milestone and news regarding Pulse 6. So Pulse 6 is the a new version of Pulse that we released in December, 2020. So almost three years ago. And since we have done a lot of interim releases, so we have done 13 releases since version 6.0 and now we’re in version 6.3. So if you are using an older version of Pulse, please upgrade. ’cause especially version 6.3 that we released last month is very stable, it is very robust and we have a lot of new features and performance optimization so you should not miss out and yeah, try to upgrade as soon as possible to the latest, which is version 6.3. So some milestones I will just highlight three. So now Pulse can be installed anywhere, it can monitor IBM cloud, it can be installed on the Cubewise cloud if you don’t have a server dedicated where you can install Pulse, there has been lots of optimizations in the way Pulse 6 works, as I said now with 6.3, yeah it’s much faster. So we got really good feedback from our customers and the Arc and Pulse integration has been introduced three months ago where now you can connect Arc and Pulse because in Pulse we have a lot of information and we, we had the request from our users that they, they are, they, they’re using Arc a lot to develop and now they want to see the pulse feature, access the pulse feature and the pulse data through Arc. So this is very exciting because yeah, Arc you’re probably using it all day, whereas Pulse you might not go there just couple of times a day.

So now with Arc, when you’re inside Arc and you are building your applications, you can reach thePulse features and you can see the Pulse data. So we have started raising some features of Pulse inside Arc and we’re going to continue in the next, next year to bring more features, more Pulse, features inside Arc. What is coming? So we are currently testing pulses with TM1 v12.

There are lots of changes as you probably have seen in the IBM update, TM1 v12. So we are currently testing it right now doing regarding the live migration. So currently in version 6.3, we just released the migration of subset live. So Pulse is going to recreate your subsets into your target environment without having to restart your tier one instance. So the only two things that we’re missing are views and data.

So we’re currently working on views. So soon you will be able to migrate views using the live migration and the next step will be data. And something else that we’re working on is open search. So if you have used the Pulse Explorer before, so the Pulse explorer is explored by Elasticsearch and there’s a new version of Elasticsearch, you could, you could call it a new version which is called open search, which bring new features. So we are working on it, it should be, should be coming very soon. So if we, if we have some time, I will show you the, the Pulse explorer. So yeah, some stories and or you could call it tips. So there are stories that we have seen in different parts presentation. This one is from a customer or during our demo or sessions with our customers.

So I just took three which are very, I think interesting and which highlights some features of Pulse that you might be not using. So I will highlight, so this one, this one is a, is a screenshot I took from Adam Havas is working at J&J in the US and he, he has done a, a presentation aboutPulse two years ago.

And what I like here is that he, he, he was showing like by using the long-running operations chart, he was able to find out that there were a lot of long-running operations in his application. Because when you are a TM1 developer and when you are testing your process before you move it to my to production, it’s difficult to test exactly in the same condition.

Maybe you will have less users, the the, you will probably have less things running at the same time. So when you go to production, then you can check exactly how long it is taking and you can monitor over the time how long it’s taking. So you can see during the first, the first, the first section, there was lots of wait time.

So they, they made some, they changed their TIs and they could see some improvements and the third week they were able to go live and they could see with the charts that what they have done has reduced the, the processing time. So this is very helpful and especially to you as a developer or administrator that because when you do something with TM1 is not, is not that easy or straightforward to justify or to show exactly that what you have done had an impact, had it is now better what you changed than before. So now with Pulse you have charts, you have the data that will show you that this is how it was before, how long it was taking after the change, this is now how long it takes.

So you could use it when to, to show that what you’ve done is has improved, but sometimes what you’re doing might slow down the process in real life. So it’s also an example where you could use it. If you see that now it’s taking more time, then you can review your changes to try to find out why now your process is taking more time than it used to.

Alright, another story. This one it was, it’s actually from a, from a customer in the US where we were, we were doing a, a Pulse session. So Pulse was running in the environment and we run, sorry, maybe I will show you first where is the flow diagram? So I, I’ll jump back to Pulse, alright, so if you’ve never seen Pulse before, I’m just going to refresh. So I’m logged in. So this is Pulse 6. So if you want to see the flow diagram, you need to go to reports. This is where you have lots of information and you’d select your instance. I’m going to go to this, this environment here. So first I select my environmental server, which in this case I have three servers inside this servers at multiple TM1 instances, then you go to reports and under performance you can select your instance. And I’m going to select this one here. And this is where as, as I was saying before, like you, you have lots of, lots of data. The one I want to highlight is the long running operation. So this is the chart that Adam was showing in his slides.

So you can see the time and how long the operation took. So what is interesting, I don’t know if you noticed, but you have, so this is the operation, so we think that is taking more than 60 seconds. And then you have an operation tab where you can see the details of this operation. So for example, in here you, you can see this one which took 4000 seconds and if you wanna see the breakdown you can click the blue, the blue arrow here and you will see the breakdown. So you can see that 3,600 seconds were taken by this process. Then another 300 seconds by the other process here. So you can see where the breakdown of this 4,000. So if we, if we take another example like this one Yeah, which is 2000. So if you go down you will see yeah, 2004. Yeah this one is mainly just one, one process that is currently in a weight. So this is where you can find this, this long run operation, which I, I used as well when I was a chairman consultant. And it’s very, it’s very, very helpful to quickly see yeah if you have some long running operations during your day-to-day during your day-to-day, day-to-day work. So this is the first one. I hope you, you found it useful and yeah, I’m happy to take any questions. If, if there are some message, feel free to yeah, step in ’cause I can’t see the question from my screen. Alright, so the next one is about the flow diagram. So this one is probably my favorite feature in Pulse, the one I used the most when I was working on tier one project. So in this example I was quite happy because I was doing a, a Pulse session with a customer in the US and we run the flow diagram. So the flow diagram, it’s, it’s, it’s just showing you all the link between your objects between cube processes. So you can see in blue, the blue rectangle cubes, the green one processes. And what is very interesting is the yellow one. So the yellow one will be the one, the object that are missing. So that do not exist anymore. So it mean like, so in the exact example, in this example where we, we saw one yellow one and we could see it’s a rectangle.

So it’s a cube, it’s a di cube through, it’s a direct link to another cube. So it mean it’s a rule. So we went to, so they just had workspace or went to workspace and we searched for this cube name in the rule file. And you can see on the right that we were able to find the cube name in the rule.

Even though the cube name, the cube does not exist. So it can happen like especially when I was working on a project where I had to rename cube. So you need to create a new cube and then you need to replace the all the cube name in your process and your rules. So you might forget one or two locations where you, where you still have the old cube name.

So in this case, TM1 does not throw an error, it’s just your rule is not valid because it has been saved before you change the cube name. So the rule is not valid, but you can’t notice it unless you go to the rule and you check by yourself. But whispers by using the flow diagram, you can quickly see all the, the objects which are not, which does not exist, but they’re still part of your code. So if you want to, the flow diagram is very popular. So if you go to reports, documentation, see where you have technical, technical maybe I will go to, for this example, I’ll go to this server and then I’ll go to reports, documentation, flow diagram, I select this instance and it’s where you have lots of options if you want to look for search for a specific cube or specific dimension.

If you want to exclude some, if you have some technical cubes or processes that you don’t need, you can select the levels and then you can click generate. So yeah, so it open on this screen and you can see now. So this is also an example where as I was showing, so this is our general ledger cube and we have one day is just one row, one arrow from retail engine. It’s a rule. So you can see here the yellow, it means there’s an invalid rule inside this cube. All right? And as you can see on the screen the, the red one dimensions and you can see in gray the source of the TI. So you can see this process is loading data from this data source into the cube.

All right, next story. So this one was, I, I took this one from Nimesh who is working in Sydney for Cubewise. And he was helping a customer, he was helping a customer troubleshooting why the application was was slow. So what he did actually to notice the slowness of the application is used the system summary report. So the system summary reporting Pulse, it’s a report in, it’s a a one pager, one PDF that can be sent to your managers or to some key power key users in your application that do not need to log into Pulse. They will just get this report into by email. So they don’t even need to log into Pulse and they get a summary of the most important information that, that you want to, to see to and to quickly understand if there is an issue or not in your system to quickly check if your system is healthy. So in this example, you can see on the first screenshot, the first one on the left is the, the alerts, the alerts charts in this report where I was able to quickly find out on which day there was a peak of alerts and then there is another chart on the right where it was able to see that the wait time, you can see on the right, the wait time after applying all the recommendations, the wait time decreased in a, in a, in a couple of weeks. So again, this is another example where with the Pulse data you can really show to your business users or to your customers that what you did had a good impact in your, in the application.

So if you want to run the system summary reports, you need to go to reports, documentation to the sorry document reports and you’ll find the system summary report and the performance, sorry, was a bit lost. So in system summary report, this is where you need to select, you select your team instance, this is where you can schedule either you want to get every week, every other week, every month you can test the report, you can save it. So I already prepare the report and this is how it looks. So it’s a PDF. So you can see I generated for the last month of data and this is how what what you will see. So you’ll see first the number of sessions with the number of alerts, then we see wait time.

So for example here we can quickly see that the wait time was looks okay, but on the 9th of October there was a big peak of wait at this time. So this is where now we can go to Pulse and zoom into the speci to the specific day to understand why there were, why there was a big wait time, the 9th of October compared to the rest of the days.

And then yeah, below you can see the, the number of alerts by type. There are different types of alerts in Pulse. So this report is very, it’s very useful because again, you don’t need to log into Pulse, you can just send or receive this report every week and then you can quickly see the trend about your applications. Are you getting more earlier than before without having to log in into Pulse, all right, so this is story number three I think. Yeah, that’s it. Alright, what’s new in Pulse? Maybe just quickly. Yeah, on version 6.3 we have added a, a lot of new features. Like one of them is a new overview page. So because now with one Pulse you can monitor more than one environment. So we have some customers, they have five, 10 environments with 80 or 90 plus TM1 instances. So with one page you can see, you can see now everything, the documentation update is quite nice. Now you can see from your, you can enter the documentation in your, in your TI and then Pulse is going to pick the documentation and add it to the Pulse documentation. So you don’t need to go to Pulse to enter your comments Pulse is going to grab your comments from your code live migration of subsets, something I mentioned earlier, custom links, I I will show it just, just later. And the approval features, it’s something which has been requested by a few customers. It is regarding like to embrace the peer review to enforce, in a way you are enforcing your developers to review someone health package before it can be migrated. So if you are, you are a developer and then you create a package, then you need to submit an approval request and then you need one of your colleague to review your package before it gets migrated into production. So by doing this, even though it add one step, so you might feel that it may be cumbersome, but it’s, it adds some confidence into the process because at least what you are going to migrate will be reviewed by someone else.

So when you press the button to migrate, you’ll be more confident doing your migration. So yeah, so what can, what I can show is the, yeah, the overview page that you can see here with all your environment. So it’s, it’s a level on top of the dashboard, something that was added external links, right? Something small, but it can be useful if you have some internal wiki or some internal documentation you want to, to add into the, the Pulse, Pulse left panel. And what we have added, as I was saying, is the approval step. So if you are, if you are, so I will log out from this user, I will log in with a, a user who is not admin or just a approver. And then with this one I’m, I’m going to create a, a new package. So if I go to create a package, I’m going to select first the type manual CXMD, I’m going to select the cube, I’m going to pick the employee cube that I want to migrate. Click next. So you can see selecting the cube and the rule file and then it’s going to find the dependencies so that in all the dimensions, even the attribute cube, the pick this cubes, the drill rule is picking all the dependencies for you can click. Next I’m going to live update horizon employee cube. Yeah. So I’m going to create a live, live update package and clicking save. And what is different now that you cannot execute, you cannot execute a package. And by the way, this feature of request approval is not because it’s a big change in the, in the workflow of your migration. It is off by default. So we have an, there is a setting in pulse if you want to turn it on. So once it is turned on, any package will have to be approved before it can immigrate. So in this case I’m just creating a package.

So I’m going to request approval. So this is where, so you request approval on the target. So in this case I want to, I want to do the migration on this instance and I’m going to select my approval group in this case and I will suggest new migration, blah blah blah, new migration to prod of employee cube. And then I click submit.

So what’s going to happen now is that the request is submitted, so, so all the reviewers will receive an email and then the reviewers can go to the approval request and they can go and edit. So we need to, in this case we need to log in with a different user. Vincent? Yes, we are on time. Okay, perfect.

We have three minutes left. I see there’s one question qa, so unless there’s more questions, I think we’re, let’s do it. Yeah, I’m happy to take the question if you, Okay, so in the meantime, so we have one question from Daniel who’s asking if there’s a plan to increase the size of the dimensions which can be migrated Well yeah, so actually you, you, so it’s a good question actually you can already do it. So well migrating a dimension with Pulse. So what is important to be aware of is the, so there is a help article. So if you go to a, you need to go to administration source level, say Sandy, and you can see here actually you have a help.

This is a link to the head particle here. So by default Pulse is going to migrate elements only for dimension which have less of 5,000 elements. So this is a setting in Pulse, if you want to increase it, you can, it’s in the Pulse config file, you can increase this five to a thousand, a hundred thousand or a million if you want.

But the reason why we set it to 5,000 is because the most efficient way to create elements in tier one is to use a TM1 process. So if you have a dimension with more than 5,000 elements, it’s very likely that this dimension is populated by process. So when you do a migration, you should migrate the dimension with the process and ask first to execute the process to populate the elements.

But if you want, you can increase the estimate and ask first to migrate the elements one by one. It is possible, but just be aware that it’s going to be slower than if you do it by process. Okay, thank you Vincent, before we move on to, to the last part, I will just show up the, just a second.

Okay. The feedback session. So please take a take a minute to share your feedback. Yeah, just on thing. Yes. Okay. And let me check if we have any other questions. I don’t see any. All right, So Vincent, I think you can, if you still want to show us the, the last part for the approval, I think, well, yeah, I guess it’s probably not the most exciting demo approval process, but it is very important. Yeah, so you can go there and click the approve button, but maybe if I have five minutes just to highlight the, the Pulse Explorer and something that we have added recently is that you don’t have to be a Pulse admin to have access to the Pulse explorer.

So if you, if you go to the group security, there is an explorer admin, so you can give access to the Pulse explorer to non Pulse admin. So yeah, so once you have access to the Pulse explorer, you will get the link here and the reports. And if you go to the Pulse explorer, this is where you have, this is the tool that can help you to visualize all the data, all the goodness that per is storing. So it is very helpful I think. Yeah, we we’re over time now message, but yeah, We are, we are. Alright. So yeah, you can go there and actually you can find on YouTube the presentation from last year where I did a deep dive on into the, the Pulse explorer. So yeah, you can, you can check it online the next, but yeah, it’s very easy to use and it’s very, very helpful. Alright, well, okay. Yeah, Thank you Vincent very much. So attendees, if you want to, can still connect with Vincent for the networking career. The next sessions that we’ll have actually the big one that we have in 15 minutes that I encourage you to, to join is the TM1 World Team Championship. Okay, 15 minutes. And with this, thank you again. Have a nice day.