Technical Articles
Scheduling your data stories with SAP Analytics Cloud
After a long wait one of the most anticipated capabilities has finally arrived to SAP Analytics Cloud:scheduling data stories and dashboards to a variety of destinations .
In this blog post I will cover the current scheduling capabilities and the road map ahead of us that will continuously add more scheduling and bursting functionality to the SAP Analytics Cloud platform.
Background
SAP announced during SAP TechEd 2019 on the about to come scheduling capabilities which were planned for Q1/2020,in the SAP Analytics Cloud roadmap which is updated for December 2019 you can see what’s the current plan :
Source :SAP roadmap viewer
The updated roadmap for scheduling (02.2020) in much more detailed and offering a great deal of scheduling and bursting capabilities :
Source :SAP Embedded and Enterprise Strategy for SAP Analytics Cloud
In this extended road map for schedule publications we can see lot’s of new planned capabilities that are available in the SAP BI CMC scheduling and bursting.
This is definitely the right direction for SAP Analytics Cloud supporting simple and advanced scheduling capabilities like event and calendar based triggers,support bursting (filter based profile distribution) and make sure that the information ,especially the important one is getting in the right time and the right people which are awaiting for that information to take action.
While collaboration based environments are rapidly growing (Slack ,Teams ,Azure DevOps) the requirement for data distribution ,push notification to emails and cloud locations especially to destinations which are not connected directly to our analytics platform will remain solid for the next few years
Scheduling in SAP Analytics Cloud
The scheduling capabilities are available since release 2020.03 only for SAP Analytics cloud Tenants based on the AWS data center(Cloud foundry based)
The scheduling in SAP Analytics Cloud is accessed through the share button and then the Schedule Publication option
The scheduling options are quite simple for now and as mentioned above are aligned with the roadmap plan,only PDF format is supported for now.
The recurrence is currently supporting three options :hour,day and week.the monthly option is planned for the future direction (beyond Q2/2020)
There are standard start and end recurrence and also an option to set the number of repetitions ,e.g:run weekly ,every Monday for 8 times (8 weeks) instead of setting an end date.
Once the mandatory fields are filled – Topic and SAP or non SAP Analytics Cloud recipient the schedule is set
and followed with a notification that the schedule was created successfully
If you want to track your current schedules you can navigate to the calendar and see what’s the schedule status ,there is no option for now to edit the schedules but you can delete them
There are four main statuses for the scheduling :
- Inactive – awaiting it’s run time
- In progress -job is currently being executed
- Cancelled – job failed
- Success – data story sent successfully to it’s destination
Advanced options
For now bursting and distribution based on profiles which is handled really well in SAP BI isn’t supported (in future direction of the road map)
The bursting enables to send the same data story to different profiles based on what a profile is allowed to see (different segments of data ,e.g:region) and as we need to support both direct and indirect users the bursting enables us to use row level security which corresponds to the data source restrictions and profiles which defines the report filtering before being sent to a user which doesn’t necessarily has access to the data source.
One way to enable different restrictions for different users or user groups is to us the bookmark option from the Display menu in a data story
Once you create the bookmarks you can use them in the scheduling options and basically assign different views for each group based on a bookmark that can contain the filtering logic of your data story and the rest of the story configuration
Going back to the scheduling options we can now use in the story view the option to use my bookmark and assign a view per team and therefor schedule for different teams
we can then assign to another view a different team with a different bookmark
Conclusion
Scheduling data stories is finally supported and although the current functionality is basic there is a clear and promising road map ahead that will enhance the scheduling and the SAP Analytics Cloud platform operational capabilities
For additional details you can check the 20202.03 release :
https://www.sapanalytics.cloud/product_updates/release-2020-03/#_Administration_&_Infrastructure_3
Hi Yoav,
Thanks for your blog. I'm part of the Scheduling Beta and I'm testing scenarios with live BW and HANA connections including end-to-end SSO. I will publish something in the near future about this as well.
Kind regards,
Martijn van Foeken | Interdobs
Hi Martin,
as we are also using Live Connections to BW only this would be very interesting and I am lloking forward to your presentation.
Regards
Kjell
Thanks Martjin ,we are also running different scheduling scenarios including S/4 and checking how can we structure best global bookmarks for data stories data specific slicing
Hi Yoav,
Thanks for sharing!
Is this scheduling functionality already available on production systems? I've checked a story on one of our customers' system, but I don't see the Schedule Publication option you have in your screenshots.
Regards,
Frank
Hi Frank,
I don't believe it's generally available yet. My best guess would be that it might be included in the Q2 release scheduled in May 2020. Another pre-requisite is that you need to be on a CF tenant, which means you have a double-digit URL like eu10 or us10.
Kind regards,
Martijn van Foeken | Interdobs
Hi Martijn,
Thank you for explaining.
Our customer is not on a CF tenant (in the URL I see eu1). With being on a CF tenant as pre-requisite, do you mean: that scheduling is not available just at this moment for non-CF tenants or that it will also be not available for non-CF tenants when it’s released (probably in Q2 then).
Regards,
Frank
Hi Frank ,as for now ,scheduling is only supported for SAP Analytics cloud Tenants based on the AWS data center(Cloud foundry based).
What might change in the future we don't know as the current scheduling road map isn't relating to that (yet)
Hi Yoav,
Thanks for making this clear.
Regards,
Frank
Hi Frank and thanks for your response ,this feature is supported for cloud foundry tenants but requires both enabling scheduling and assign roles to the group/user so he can schedule the data stories ,per SAP roadmap this functionality
SAP official note regarding availability and release is :
https://www.sapanalytics.cloud/product_updates/release-2020-03/
Hi Yoav,
Is checking the URL on double digits the only way to check if the system is on a CF tenant?
Regards,
Frank
you can see also under administration -->account information -->region host if CF is part of your region host
Hi Yoav,
thanks for sharing. This is a part we are waiting for.
When will it be available as I can not see the possibility under the sharing button on our system on 2020.2.6.
Is there any information or rerlease date or wave?
Regards
Kjell
Hi Kjell,
Please check my previous reply ;-).
Kind regards,
Martijn van Foeken | Interdobs
Hi Kjell ,
it is available from release 2020.03
https://www.sapanalytics.cloud/product_updates/release-2020-03/#_Administration_&_Infrastructure_3
but only for SAP Analytics cloud Tenants based on the AWS data center(Cloud foundry based)