1. Understand Discovery Center Project Suite Position | Migrating to ActiveNav Cloud

1.1 Activity Summary

Activities

This Activity involves running a small number of Custom Queries provided by ActiveNav on each deployed Discovery Center Project Suite instance. These Custom Queries have been developed specifically to identify the data and configuration of each Discovery Center Project Suite instance to aid understanding and planning for the deployment of ActiveNav Cloud.

In the case of a customer having multiple Discovery Center Project Suite instances deployed the Custom Queries must be deployed and run on each instance individually, with the results then consolidated to give a full picture of the data and configuration in use across all instances.

The Custom Queries required are not deployed as standard with Discovery Center Project Suite but can be acquired from ActiveNav Support. They are provided in a zip file which also includes a document indicting how they should be deployed and run, but the details of the steps required are as follows:

1.2 Deploy Custom Queries to each Discovery Center Project Suite Application Server

For Custom Queries to be available to run through the Discovery Center Project Suite Application’s UI the files comprising the Custom Queries themselves must be saved to the correct location on the Discovery Center Project Suite instance's Application Server. This is a simple case of extracting each of the ‘.xml’ files from the zip provided file to the ‘CustomQueries’ directory in the Discovery Center installation folder on the application folder. By default, this directory would be at the path: ‘C:\Program Files\Active Navigation\Discovery Center\CustomQueries’, but if a custom installation location was chosen when the application was installed the path will be relative to that location instead.

1.3 Run Custom Queries in each Discovery Center Project Suite Application UI

Once the Custom Queries have been deployed to the correct directory on the application server, they will be available for selection when running Custom Queries through the application UI for any user with the ‘AN Administrator’ role.

By default, the execution of Custom Queries from the Discovery Center application is disabled, however, a user in the ‘System Administrator’ role can enable them from within the application interface. To do this they should navigate to the ‘System Settings -> Discovery Center’ tab and ‘Edit’ the ‘Global Settings’ to ensure the ‘Enable Custom Queries’ option is selected.

With this option enabled any Discovery Center Project Suite user that has the ‘AN Administrator’ role can access and run each of the Custom Queries by navigating to the ‘Reporting and Actions -> Custom Queries’ tab: 

Then selecting the required Custom Query and selecting ‘Execute’:

When each Custom Query is executed, the results will be downloaded in the browser as a ‘.csv’ file. The list of Custom Queries that should be run in this case is as follows:

1.4 Gather and Consolidate Results

As the results of each individual Custom Query are downloaded as a single .csv file in the running user’s browser this step is simply to gather each of the result files together and store them safely for subsequent assessment in the upcoming planning phase. In the case of multiple Discovery Center Project Suite instances, the result files from each instance should be grouped together to aid the planning process. In most cases the results from multiple Discovery Center Project Suite instances can simply be combined when considering the deployment to AN Cloud, but the Discovery Center Project Suite instance that they were retrieved from may have some bearing on planning of things such as collector locations and Business Unit definitions, so maintaining that understanding into the planning phase may be useful.