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LCM and ADD

  • 3 March 2021
  • 2 replies
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Hello.

I am trying to understand the concepts of Automated Data Distribution (ADD) and Life Cycle Management (LCM) and I am not quite sure if I understands them well. 

Could you elaborate on the features and how they cooperate, if at all?

Thank you,

Tom

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Best answer by Chase W. 5 March 2021, 22:28

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2 replies

Thanks for the detailed answer. It is clear now! 

Hi Tom, 

Thanks for writing in, that’s a great question.  These two are related conceptually and work together but are different features of our platform.

 

First, let’s take a common scenario where you are providing analytics for each of your clients and they need to access their data.

ADD is an automated process that is used to push data from your data source (typically a data warehouse)  into GoodData workspaces to be used for the insights/dashboards. You can load multiple workspaces from the same data source at once using ADD. It separates the data based on some identifier, usually a customer ID, so only the data that applies for that client is loaded into the corresponding workspace.  If you have client ‘123’, then only ‘123’ data is in that workspace.  It’s highly scalable and can be used for 10,000+ clients if needed.  It can be customized to run at different days/times and at different frequencies, up to near real-time, too.

LCM is a similar process but this is used to provision or de-provision (that is, add or remove) two things: A) workspaces and B) users for those workspaces.  In a common scenario, you would have one or more ‘Master’ workspaces that act as a template.  If you have a new client, you would replicate the ‘Master’ to create a new workspace for that new client.  Perhaps you have a free and paid version of your product with different reports or functionality.  Then, you might have a ‘Free Master’ and a ‘Paid Master’.  The LCM ‘Bricks’ would be configured to create/update/remove workspaces based on your rules and source data.  Another common scenario is the need to release new features out to clients, perhaps you added a new dashboard or some new insights.  This is easily done by updating your Master and running LCM to release this functionality.  This will automatically push out the release to all workspaces/clients using that Master.

Regarding users,  if you have 10 users that should have access to ‘123’ client data in a workspace, the LCM ‘Bricks’ will check the source data for those users (typically a user provisioning file from another source system) and update the users in the workspace.  In addition to adding or removing users, this can update their roles (admin, editor, viewer) or other characteristics.

 

These two features are key components scaling efficiently by automating data and appropriate access for a handful or thousands of clients using your analytics product.

 

For further reading, we recently wrote an article that goes in using ADD. 

 

To get a little more detailed, you can find further documentation on ADD and LCM here:

ADD: https://help.gooddata.com/doc/en/data-integration/data-preparation-and-distribution/data-preparation-and-distribution-pipeline/data-pipeline-reference/automated-data-distribution-reference/automated-data-distribution

LCM: https://help.gooddata.com/doc/en/workspace-and-user-administration/managing-workspaces-via-life-cycle-management

 

Hope that helps!  If you have further questions, please let us know.

 

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