3.1 Activity Summary
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Activity Description |
Uninstall all Discovery Center Project Suite components from local infrastructure, re-provision hardware as required |
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Goals |
Remove the Discovery Center Project Suite footprint from any servers, reconsider use of servers that Discovery Center Project Suite components were installed on |
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Participants |
IT Team |
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Pre-requisites |
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Outputs |
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Activities
This is the final phase in the process of migration from Discovery Center Project Suite to ActiveNav Cloud, and results in the removal of the Discovery Center Project Suite application from the organization’s infrastructure.
As with the process of migrating components to the ActiveNav Cloud application there are a couple of different options for how to undertake this process which should be considered upfront before any component removal is performed. Essentially there is choice between reducing the use and removing data from the Discovery Center Project Suite application in phases, as ActiveNav Cloud usage is increased, or simply removing everything in one go once all migration activities have been completed.
Regardless of the decommission strategy, at the conclusion of this phase the Discovery Center Project Suite application can be removed altogether and the infrastructure and software licenses it consumed can be made available for other purposes if required. There is also an option to back-up data and audit records from any Discovery Center Project Suite instances before they are decommissioned if there is a requirement to do so.
3.2 Determine Decommission Strategy
As noted above, before any components are changed or removed from Discovery Center Project Suite instances some thought should be given to how to approach the decommission process. This decision will be informed by the migration strategy being followed as well as the number of Discovery Center Project Suite instances in use and the volume of data under management within each. Essentially though the decision comes down to what point Discovery Center Project Suite is no longer required for the management and processing of indexes.
Once an Index is no longer required in Discovery Center Project Suite the simplest option is for it to remain defined in the application, but no longer run. This means that the processing time taken up by the Index will no longer prevent other processes from being run in the Discovery Center Project Suite instance.
The other option is for it to be removed from the application, which has the effect of removing all of the data previously recorded for containers and files within the Index from the database. The benefit of removal is that the reduction of the amount of data stored in the database may have a positive performance impact on other operations for the Discovery Center Project Suite instance, particularly longer running database intensive processes such as Statistics Calculation and Reporting Database Processing. In removing Indexes there may also be the knock-on effect of certain Credentials no longer being used in the application, in which case the Credential records can also be removed. If the accounts being used by these Credentials were dedicated for use in the Discovery Center Project Suite application, then that also means that the underlying accounts can be deleted altogether.
At the point that there are no longer any Indexes being run or in place in a Discovery Center Project Suite instance then that application can be removed and the hardware and software licenses it consumes can be re-provisioned.
Ultimately the determination of when Indexes are no longer needed in a Discovery Center Project Suite will come down to the migration approach and ensuring the business processes are in place using ActiveNav Cloud to achieve the necessary business outcomes for the Index location without the need for Discovery Center Project Suite.
The point this is achieved will be a decision each customer will have to make for themselves, but our recommendation would be not to try and base it on generating equivalent output from the two ActiveNav products. They have been designed in different ways and are oriented around different concepts, with a lot of complexity in each dedicated to processing and reporting on data in different ways. That makes it difficult to perform useful comparisons on the data that is held in each different product so our recommendation here is to consider when a specific business goal is being met with ActiveNav Cloud such that Discovery Center Project Suite is no longer required, rather than to try and demonstrate equivalence in reporting or other behavior.
Example
Prest have a single Discovery Center Project Suite instance which includes a relatively large amount of data under management and have opted to migrate to ActiveNav Cloud in a phased approach, one Business Unit at a time. Alexander Knight has decided that as each Data Source is migrated to ActiveNav Cloud its equivalent Index on Discovery Center will immediately be unscheduled, so will no longer run, but remain defined in the application.
The expectation will then be on each Business Unit owner to manage duplicate and stale files using their own processes built around the use of ActiveNav Cloud, meaning Alexander no longer needs to present them with data extracts from Discovery Center Project Suite. As the owner of the 'IT' Business Unit, he will be able to validate this process himself from the initial migration of the 'IT' file share Index, which will then inform the approach to further migrations and workflow definitions across the business.
Once Alexander is confident that reports are no longer required from Discovery Center Project Suite for a given Business Unit that has been migrated to ActiveNav Cloud, he plans to remove the Indexes relating to the Business Unit locations from Discovery Center Project Suite altogether.
After removing Indexes Alexander will check to see whether there are any Credential records defined in Discovery Center Project Suite that no longer have any uses in the application. If this is the case, then he will also remove the Windows service account or Azure registered app that relates to the Credential record before removing the Credential record from Discovery Center Project Suite as well.
When all Discovery Center Project Suite Indexes have been removed Alexander plans to uninstall the Discovery Center Project Suite application and delete the host Virtual Machine altogether.
3.3 Unschedule or Remove Indexes
This step is simple the process of preventing indexes from running in Discovery Center Project Suite. If an Index is only being run manually then there are no steps required in the application to prevent it from being run again. If an Index has an automated schedule in place in the Discovery Center Project Suite application, then this schedule can simply be removed to prevent any further execution of the Index.
It is recommended that Indexes are left in a defined state in Discovery Center Project Suite without being run further, at least until it can be validated that they are no longer required. It may be the case that Indexes will need to be run again while business processes and user training activities within ActiveNav Cloud are refined, and there is no reason that they can’t continue to be run alongside Discovery or Feature Extraction processes in ActiveNav Cloud if that makes sense from a business process perspective. However, if this is the case, we would recommend that that a Discovery Center Project Suite Index and an ActiveNav Cloud Discovery or Feature Extraction that target data in the same location are not run at the exact same time. This is simply to avoid contention on infrastructure as well as access to the containers and files themselves from each product, as this will at the very least result in reduced performance on both applications but may also cause errors in processing depending on the specific circumstances.
It may be the case that Indexes remain in an unscheduled state until the Discovery Center Project Suite application is removed, but as described in the previous section there may be a benefit in removing the Indexes from the application when they are no longer required, to allow for performance improvement and the clean-up of unused Credentials. While Indexes can be re-created if necessary, depending on their configuration this may be challenging, so it is recommended that they are only removed once it has been validated that they are no longer required for any business processes.
The Discovery Center Project Suite User Guide and inline help pages provide detail on the specific steps to follow to remove an Index Schedule or delete an Index from the application.
3.4 Remove Credentials
At the point that Indexes are no longer required in Discovery Center Project Suite, an assessment can also be made on the need for Credential records assigned to indexed locations within the application. Once it’s the case that there is no need for Discovery Center Project Suite to access a given location for indexing or any other interaction, then the Credential record assignment to that location is no longer required. It may be the case that a single Credential record in the application is assigned to multiple locations on the Network Map, so care should be taken in this assessment to ensure that any Credential records are removed only at the point they aren’t in active use at any location on the Network Map.
The simplest way to achieve this is for a user with the System Administrator role to remove the Credential assignment from a given location on the Network Map at the point it is no longer required. That will then be reflected in the 'Usages' count in the 'Credential Management' view, once that count is at zero, then it is safe to also delete the Credential record itself.
When considering the deletion of Credentials from the Discovery Center Project Suite application it may also be possible to remove the underlying authentication object itself. It may be the case that a particular Windows user account or Azure App Registration was put in place specifically for use by the Discovery Center Project Suite application. If this is the case then at this point the account or app registration can also be deleted.
3.5 Consider Back-up of Data
Prior to the removal of Discovery Center Project Suite instances some thought should be given to the data that has been captured by the application and whether there is a business need to retain any of it once the application and database have been removed.
The containers, files and their metadata under management within a Discovery Center Project Suite instance comprise the majority of data held within the application database, and as the previous steps have migrated the management of that data to the ActiveNav Cloud platform there would typically not be a need to back any of it up.
What is more likely is a need for audit records to be retained from within the Discovery Center Project Suite database, particularly those relating to file level actions, where files have been moved or deleted from processes within the application. There are a few options for how these records could be retained:
3.5.1 Manual collation of Audit records from the application UI
Any activity that is run from a Discovery Center Project Suite instance has an associated history record that can be retrieved in the 'Activity History' page in the UI. Any activity record that includes any detail requiring audit also contains an Audit Log record, and these can be downloaded in either 'CSV' or 'XLSX' format, depending on application configuration, for each activity individually. It will then be down to the application user to collate and store these records as appropriate for their business retention case.
3.5.2 Retrieve audit details from a SQL query
This option will require collaboration with the ActiveNav support team, with details of the specific requirements needing to be provided. It allows for any relevant audit records to be retrieved from the database in a single result set using a SQL query. The query could either be run directly against the Discovery Center Project Suite SQL Server database, which would require access to the database from a user with relevant permissions, or as a Custom Query run through the application UI, similar to those described in section 1 of this guide. In either case the results would be returned as a single 'CSV' file, and it would again be down to the customer to determine how and where to store that file subsequently.
3.5.3 Database back-up
There is also an option to take a full back-up of the Discovery Center Project Suite SQL database. ActiveNav wouldn’t normally recommend this approach for the following reasons:
Firstly, in order to obtain the specific audit details of any particular action the database back-up would need to be restored and a SQL query would need to be run in order to retrieve the data for the Audit record(s) in question. This would require time, infrastructure and expertise of the Discovery Center Project Suite database schema, all of which may be difficult to obtain at the point the audit details are required.
Secondly, the total amount of data held in the full database back-up would be much greater than the amount solely dedicated to Audit records, so the storage and retention of a full database back-up just for this purpose would be inefficient in terms of the amount of space being consumed by the back-up set.
One benefit that this full database back-up approach does bring though is that it would make the process to restore a Discovery Center Project Suite application instance simpler, should that ever be required. This isn’t considered to be a likely scenario though, as the previous steps should have confirmed the use of ActiveNav Cloud in place of Discovery Center Project Suite to achieve the business goals of the organization.
3.6 Uninstall Discovery Center Project Suite Application
The final step in the migration process is to remove any Discovery Center Project Suite instances that are no longer required following the migration to ActiveNav Cloud. The point at which Discovery Center Project Suite applications are not needed will vary between organizations depending on the overall strategy and approach to the migration process, as described in this guide previously, but once it has been confirmed that any single Discovery Center Project Suite application is no longer in use it can be removed.
The process to remove a Discovery Center Project Suite instance is a simple one, the application can be uninstalled using the 'Add/Remove Programs' feature on the Windows server it’s installed on. If this is the case then the application’s SQL relational database and the SSAS cube for it will be removed by default during the uninstall process. The application uninstall can also be initiated by re-running the MSI that it was initially deployed with. If this is the case then an option will be presented to the user to decide whether or not the SQL relational database and SSAS cube should be removed as well, and both options should be selected to allow the application to be removed in full. This full uninstall assumes that any steps to capture data required for audit purposes, as detailed in the previous section, have already been performed.
If there are any separate utility apps that have been installed alongside the Discovery Center Project Suite instance on the application server, such as the Workbench tool or the Regular Expression Validator, these can also be removed at this point if desired. Again, this is a simple process of using the 'Add/Remove Programs' feature on the application server or re-running the application's installation MSI.
With the Discovery Center Project Suite application removed consideration can be given to the Windows user accounts that were in running the application’s scheduler service and IIS Application Pool. It is usual for dedicated service accounts to be created for these functions as part of the Discovery Center Project Suite implementation process. If this is the case, then it’s possible that these accounts can also be removed from the host Active Directory instance. If there are multiple Discovery Center Project Suite instances in place across an organization then it may also be the case that these services accounts are shared across multiple Discovery Center Project Suite deployments though, so this and any other potential usages of the accounts should be validated before any removal.