Leveraging Usage Analytics for maintaining a healthy environment
Analytical Need In this article, we can find a suggested approach on how to better maintain our Sisense environment. The current tools and methodologies take us to an encumbering and challenging work. By creating a dedicated dashboard to show our environment status and add actionable widgets we can make such work much easier. The final output of this article is a dashboard which will present our environment status (e.g. unused dashboards/ElastiCubes/Users and low/high usage components). + actionable drill-down dashboards (powered by BloX) which make these dashboards much more actionable. Solution Effort estimation: ~1 hour Technical Skills required: Low Usage Analytics Usage Analytics is part of this solution. Extending the default number of days stored (default is to keep only 30 days of usage) is optional but will provide a clearer status of your environment. Enable Sisense Usage Analytics - Follow this article to enable the Usage Analytics. https://docs.sisense.com/main/SisenseLinux/enabling-usage-analytics.htm Optional: Extending the number of days stored In the Sisense configuration manager, under the "Services" tab, locate "Usage service" and update the usage.csvRotateDays to the desired period. https://docs.sisense.com/main/SisenseLinux/configuration-manager-sisense-documentation.htm *Warning! Increasing the number of days to a higher number than 30 days might affect server performance. Mainly during the usage Analytics cube build. It is strongly recommended to test the cube stability, capacity and performance before scheduling it to a frequent build. Get unused Dashboards/ElastiCubes/Users data The Usage Analytics presents information on Sisense objects that had at list one usage. In case we had no usage by a user it won't appear in the Usage Analytics data. This is the reason why we need to call some metadata API's to fetch the missing information. The process per each API call mentioned below is as follows: Make sure you are logged in as an Admin user Copy the API URL, change if required to the server location, and Paste the URL in the HTML address/Postman/etc. (It includes the required fields for this solution) Convert the JSON to a CSV format. I Recommend this online converter: https://toolslick.com/conversion/data/json-to-csv Download the CSV output and rename Users API: http://localhost:8081/api/v1/users?fields=_id%2CuserName%2Cemail%2Ccreated%2ClastLogin Dashboards API Call (for a user which has access to all dashboards) http://localhost:8081/api/v1/dashboards?fields=oid%2Ctitle%2Ccreated%2ClastOpened%2ClastUpdated%2Cdatasource.title%2ClastPublish%2CparentFolder%2Cowner Or Dashboards API Call (Admin) https://localhost:8081/api/v1/dashboards/admin?dashboardType=owner&asObject=false&fields=title%2Ccreated%2ClastOpened%2ClastUpdated%2ClastPublish%2Cdatasource.title%2CparentFolder%2Cowner%2CwidgetCount%2ClastRepublished ElastiCubes API: http://localhost:8081/api/v1/elasticubes/getElasticubes Usage Analytics Re-Design to support Unused objects data The Usage Analytics ElastiCube is not a standard cube and the internal queries are being rewritten on each build. The only way to add additional data is by adding new entities/dimensions. This is the reason why the cube structure is not a classic star schema. Steps to adjust the Usage Analytics ElastiCube for the suggested solution: Download the Usage Analytics cube file, import and replace the existing Usage Analytics model Ecube file Smodel file Adjust the file data sources to the CSV sources created in the previous step In case CSV table names were changed, adjust the custom sql based tables (DimDashboards Extended, DimElasticubes, and Dim Users Extended) Build! Healthy Environment Dashboards Check that the OOTB Usage Analytics dashboards work properly. They shouldn't be affected by the adjustments we've made. Import attached dashboards Dashboard 1 Drill1 Drill2 Enjoy!Advanced Configuration Control via API Calls
Advanced Configuration Control via API Calls Frequently, there are situations when a user is required to change some Sisense parameters when access is not available due to a wrong configuration, or it is required to automate switching of some configuration settings of Sisense. All can be made with API calls. In this example, we will enable and disable Audit logs via the API in the Linux version of Sisense. 1. On the configuration page in Sisense GUI, open the developer's console, edit and save the new configuration. 2. All the API information is in the Network tab in the Payload field: 3. Find the URL to which the call should be sent. For the configuration page, it is: http://your_site:30845/app/configuration/configurations/system/list 4. Use a Postman or a similar tool to create a correct API call. Additional information is available on the Using the REST API | Sisense Developers page. In this use case, take the output from the developer's console. Please note that there are no quotation marks before and after the base and auditLog.enabled objects, but quotation marks should be included in the correct API call payload. For example, {"base": {"auditLog.enabled":true}} or {"base": {"auditLog.enabled":false}}. 5. Run the script. In the below screenshot, there is an example of a proper Postman configuration that will disable the audit logs using an API call: Based on this example, it is possible to adapt almost every configuration parameter in Sisense using API calls. API calls can be very useful when automating actions in Sisense, for “reviving” Sisense in cases where the security settings are configured incorrectly, or in cases when the Sisense GUI is not available. If you need additional help, please contact Sisense Support.
