How to setup Smart Insights on Live HANA

In this blog here, I shared 3 reasons of WHY Smart Insights feature in SAP Analytics Cloud is important for you and your day to day analysis.

Now as we have Live HANA data support starting with Wave 20 for fast track and Q4 QRC 2020 release here are the details of how to get the end to end setup established.

Overall Setup

First- You don’t need any additional components or add-ons to get the feature working on top of your live data but an admin will need following configuration steps to opt and enable live HANA data for Smart Insights calculation.

Architecture

So why do we need Cloud Connector and what is meant by Model Metadata. To understand these questions, lets have a look at architecture diagram and see different components involved for Smart Insights on live data.

Architecture Diagram for Smart Insights on Live Data

Metadata Generation for Smart Insights –

Smart Insights algorithm that highlights Top 5 Contributors for your input data is based on 2 set of calculations. One that requires metadata information such as Number of Dimensions, Number of Members, Levels of Hierarchical Dimension and then other that computes the rank on the UI or story considering user context/filters/authorizations. Now the first one happens on backend because:

1. Depending upon data volumes, the metadata query could be time consuming and doing it on front end may hamper user experience.
2. Metadata contains statistical information about structure of underlying HANA view and hence it does not change frequently. For a SAP Analytics Cloud model, typically it would be only one time activity or only when there are huge structural changes (e.g. new tables/joins in HANA view). So the results of metadata query can be persisted on cloud cache in order to make use of it later on when Smart Insights is triggered in UI.

Use of Cloud Connector for on-premise data connectivity –

Cloud Connector acts as a secure tunnel between your company’s private firewall and public domain of SAP Analytics Cloud. In order to obtain metadata information from on-premise HANA views, SAP Cloud Connector is considered to be most secured and effective reverse proxy.

A new Technical User –

A HANA user with permissions to read metadata information is needed, which a business SSO user configured in SAP Analytics Cloud may not have. The minimum privileges required in HANA for this user are:

• InA role – sap.bc.ina.service.v2.userRole::INA_USER
• The SELECT privilege on the _SYS_BIC schema.
• The SELECT privilege on all dependent objects, such as tables or other dependent modeling
  views.

Detailed Steps in SAP Analytics Cloud

Having the above setup done for Technical User in HANA and SAP Cloud Connector pointing to HANA DB, this is what as Administrator user, you will need next to tie everything together in SAP Analytics Cloud:

1. Via System->Admin->Datasource Configurations, make sure the Live Data Sources flag is switched ON.  Kindly note for Smart Insights, only metadata and not the actual data leaves the network.
2. For existing Live HANA connection or when you create a new one, Enable model metadata generation for Smart Insights and provide Cloud Connector and Technical user-password in Advanced Features.
3. Now use the ‘Generate model Metadata for Smart Insights’ function from the Connections UI and trigger metadata generation by simply clicking ‘Generate Metadata’ button from the popup. (note metadata generation is automatically triggered for any new models that gets created against live HANA connection for which above setup is done). In case of issues, refer to SAP Note here.
4. Test Smart Insights from Story/DiBo having models with live HANA connection setup or ask business users to confirm.

Enjoy! And Share any feedback or questions in the comments.