Hyperion Planning Last Login Date

Question

Hello Everyone,
I have a requirement where in I need to track the usage of the Hyperion Planning application. I need to build a list of inactive or dormant users and clean them up from the application.
In order for me to achieve this, I need the Last Login date into the Hyperion Planning application.
I read about something called Usage Tracking that needed to be turned on. A records gets added into the hsp_audit_records table.
Can someone throw some more light on this ? My requirement is to track the planning apps usage and clean up inactive users.
Thanks
RS

Answer 1

Hi,
we have the same issue: some new users every week and a lot of users not using planning anymore- depending on their always changing role in the company.
only helpful logfile we use to identify inactive/old users is: hbrlaunch.log - it logs the username and the businessrules, they execute.
maybe you regard this approach as a helpful workaround (provided your users run businessrules at all)
users, who run only financial reporting or who open only planning forms to passively review budgets (we have that a lot) , we would delete accidentially by this approach, because if you never save data, you never execute a businessrule attached to a webform.
but what about following approach:
you create a very small webform called "Confirm my user access", add a very small businessrule named "Confirm user access", which calculates almost nothing and you attach the rule to the form, give access to all users AND use option: "run on load"
by this, the rule get's executed on opening the webform already - you could even show a member in the webform with name "Thanks for confirming your user account - it will remain active"
Only disadvantage: you need to write a mail to all users and explicitly ask them to open that webform and confirm the user access. (Maybe you like that approach)
Alternative might me that you attach the businessrule to the/those webform(s) - especially read-only webforms, where people don't save data or execute businessrules and which are opened most often by all users and don't tell them about that method at all.
You then should get a pretty complete overview of your active users (userid's only I am afraid ) in hbrlaunch.log
in addition, financial reporting has a logfile as well, so you could combine the usage of financial reporting and planning (provided you use it)
pls. note, that the early 9.3.1 financial reporting versions have a bug and the logfile is empty= useless
Assuming you use shared services, you probably have to attach your users into several groups- it maybe helpful to first remove the user from one central group, which blocks their access to planning application or takes the right to open planning forms- you then start your forecast, wait for their complaints and delete them 3 months later completely from all security groups - could save you some work on re-creating their access.
We use the apache http-webserver - you can modify it, so that it's logging all datatransfer - you get there the IP-Adress and the requested application (Hyperion Planning) and the requested webforms logged - but no username.
In the eas console, we see the last logindate, which seems to show the last date, a user requested a financial report against essbase.
We use that information in combination with hbrlaunch.log form businessrules.
we have the hsp_audit_trail switched on for all options-
data: it stores all member, user and time information for every single saved value in the database - so we have between 500.000 and 1 Mio entries - it's especially useful, when your essbase crashes and your backup is a few hours old- you then can use that information to upload the remaining data-entries via smartview/exceladdin - provided you have some hours time to prepare the values in excel.
hspaudittrail useful as well when it comes to discussion, who entered which numbers when.
tracking of businessrule execution: should deliver same results as hbrlaunch.log
other changes being tracked should be meaningless for your requirement, as it tracks the work of the admin-person (Dimensions, Members, Usergroups, Webforms)
regards
Rodian
Edited by: Rodian Abel on 01-Apr-2010 12:20
Edited by: Rodian Abel on 01-Apr-2010 12:33