Oracle continues to update EPM Automate on a regular basis. Today, we’re going to take a look at what some of recent updates have to offer Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud customers.
What is EPM Automate?
Before we touch on the latest enhancements, let’s explain EPM Automate’s purpose. EPM Automate is a command line utility that enables Service Administrators to remotely perform tasks within Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud service applications. The utility provides customers the ability to automate repeatable tasks such as importing/exporting metadata and data, uploading files into the applications, running business rules, refreshing the database and many more. The entire list of commands can be found here. Simply put, without EPM Automate an Admin’s life is a lot more hectic.
So now that we know why EPM Automate exists, let’s get to the meat of this post and discuss the latest updates.
Application Maintenance
The new renameSnapshot command enables the renaming of a snapshot to prevent the maintenance process from overwriting it. The benefit of this command is that it allows customers to rename the daily maintenance snapshot (i.e Artifact Snapshot). Therefore, daily backups can be stored within the environment.
The rundailyMaintenance command has been updated with skipNext as a new optional parameter. The parameter allows skipping the next occurrence of the daily maintenance process. Use this parameter to prevent the daily maintenance process from interfering with any long running processes in your environment. (The command itself allows for running the daily service maintenance process as needed)
A new copyfilefrominstance command copies a file from a source environment to a target environment. Keep in mind to execute the command from the target environment.
The following commands improve the file operation that EPM Automate can perform:
- listfiles – lists snapshots and files available in an environment
- deletefile – deletes snapshots and files from an environment
Users and Roles
Probably the most exciting new commands are those addressing users and roles. The bulk creation/updating of users is now possible within the cloud applications. Please note that each of the commands below involve using ANSI or UTF-8 encoded Comma Separated Value (CSV) files.
- addUsers – creates a batch of users in an identity domain. Note that if a user definition in the file matches a user account already existing in the identity domain, no changes are made to the existing user account. Hence, this command creates accounts only for new users whose account information is in the file.
- assignRole – assigns an identity domain role to all the users in the file. Separate role assignments requires separate calls to the utility.
- removeUsers – deletes the identity domain user accounts in the file that was uploaded to the environment.
- unassignRole – removes one role currently assigned to the users whose email IDs are in the file.
Implementing strategies that reduce costs, save time, and increase efficiency have never been more important. Automation is a key element in every strategy. Oracle continues to expand EPM Automate’s capabilities to meet this growing desire to automate more and more. And it’s important that organizations reevaluate the opportunities for automation on a regular basis.
Whether you’re currently using EPM Automate or are new to the cloud applications, we’re here to answer any questions you may have about expanding or implementing the utility!
