Discussion
Pegasystems Inc.
US
Last activity: 27 Aug 2021 15:44 EDT
Ask the Expert - DevOps with Anil Konakandi
Join Anil Konakandi @konda in this Ask the Expert session (16 August - 27 August) on DevOps!
Make sure to Favorite and Subscribe to be notified when we open this for you to ask questions on the 16th!
Meet Anil:
Anil is the manager for the development teams working on Deployment Manager. He has 14+ years of experience with most of it in DevOps space. He has experience creating and managing devops pipelines for the base pega platform and also for applications with both open devops and pega provided out of the box options. He is very much hands-on on Deployment Manager product and has been driving the new major versions(5.x) implementation.
Message from Anil:
Hello! I am glad to join this Ask the Expert forum and answer any questions that you may have related to deployment manager and devops with pega in general. I have a direct influence on Deployment Manager product roadmap, so I am also open to suggestions for future enhancements. Our goal with this product is to enable users to create and manage repeatable devops pipelines which can enforce consistent checks and help reduce the feedback(route to live) time so that new features can be incrementally delivered.
Ask the Expert Rules
- Follow the Pega Collaboration Center's Guidelines
- This is not a Live Chat - Anil will reply to your questions over the course of the 2-week session (16th – 27th August)
- Questions should be clearly and succinctly expressed
- Questions should be of interest to many others in the audience
- Have fun!
Updated: 25 Aug 2021 14:27 EDT
Cognizant
NL
Is there any OOTB API available which can be leveraged to export the pega packages? I am aware about the prpcServiceUtils and how it can be used in conjunction with Jenkins to create deployment packages.
I can see pega's OOTB APIs for DevOps but it doesn't provide me any for exporting and importing of packages.
One OOTB api which I could find was pzExport under System Management service package. Will it be good idea to utilize this with little modification?
***Edited by Moderator: Pallavi to change content type from Discussion to Question***
Pegasystems Inc.
IN
@Sandeep Kumar The prpcServiceUtils internally uses the API's under System Manager service package, these were intentionally not documented and would be deprecated in the future.
Have you tried using Deployment Manager to manage your pipelines? 5.x version of deployment manager exposes API's to interact with pipelines which can do deployments. You can even integrate it with Jenkins jobs as well.
Updated: 25 Aug 2021 14:27 EDT
WDC Inc
IN
Hi Everyone,
We have implemented Pega DevOps pipeline in our project and it is working fine. In the PDM, we don't have any option to capture information manually.
We have requirement from the client that, CR Number and other information need to be captured as part of the code deployment.
Please let us know the process for adding screens to capture information while deploying the code in PDM.
Thanks,
Updated: 26 Aug 2021 5:13 EDT
Pegasystems Inc.
IN
@KiranV755 You can associate CR number, User story/task Id for a feature etc. when merging a branch using the aglileworkbench integration. And in Deployment Manager 5.4 these will show up in the changes tab in the deployment report(attached image). 5.4 is tentatively schedule to be released in the first half of September.
Having said that, you are probably looking for a similar functionality when triggering a deployment, and want to be able to specify CR number etc. As of now you can only enter these in the description of the deployment. And it is on our roadmap to expose agile work bench integration when triggering a deployment.
Updated: 25 Aug 2021 14:27 EDT
t
US
We are currently doing traditional waterfall model where we have manual and automation tests in SIT and UAT environments. We are moving to Agile/Devops and I am working on POC on Devops. Based on my research, entire testing deployment is automated from Dev to Production for Devops. However when we implement, we want to do automatic code deployments in different environments but stop the pipeline to conduct manual QA testing and Manual UAT before the code is signed off for PROD deployment (in addition to selenium & API testing). If I use Jenkins (or Deployment Manager) for Devops, is it recommended to stop the pipeline for few days until manual QA is completed and manual approval is done? How is manual testing accounted in Devops implementations? Any insights would be helpful.
Note - We are in Pega 7.2 and planning upgrade next year
Updated: 26 Aug 2021 7:41 EDT
Pegasystems Inc.
IN
@New2740 Deployment manager supports the use case of manual test execution. At any stage in the deployment pipeline you can add a manual step for approval(for eg: qa sign off), which can be assigned to an appropriate person and pipeline will wait until the necessary action is taken. Even the test coverage tasks will also record the coverage metrics for manual testing as well.
In addition Deployment manager 5.x supports the concept of multi-speed deployments as well, which accounts for frequent dev-qa cycles and selectively pushing deployments to production. For details on multi-speed deployment refer to: https://community.pega.com/knowledgebase/articles/devops/86/using-multispeed-deployments
However note that the minimum supported pega version for deployment manager candidates in 7.4 which can work with 4.x orchestrator on 8.x. And the minimum supported platform version for deployment manager 5.x is pega 8.5.2. For a full list of supported combinations refer to: https://community.pega.com/knowledgebase/articles/devops/86/installing-or-upgrading-deployment-manager-5
Updated: 25 Aug 2021 14:27 EDT
Tech Mahindra
CA
We are using Pega cloud to set up the Devops for my customer. Pega has provided separate Orchestrator environment (Pega version 8.5.2 , Deployment manager version 5 ) but Candidate environments (Dt1, stg1,Prod1 ) are in Pega 8.3.4 version and Deployment manager version 4.8 .
When i setup a pipeline getting message like below even though i set up those below points stated.
"The Development environment is unable to communicate to the orchestrator."
Ensure of the following: 1.The DMReleaseAdmin authentication profile is configured with valid credentials on the Development environment. 2. DMReleaseAdmin operator has been enabled on the orchestrator environment.
Question 1: Is this because of the Environments are in different version?
Question 2: How the Orchestrator server connects to candidate environments ?
Updated: 25 Aug 2021 14:27 EDT
Pegasystems Inc.
IN
@maheshmadi The minimum supported version of PegaDevopsFoundation(the candidate component of deployment manager) with 5.x orchestrator is 4.8.4. Please ensure the candidates on Pega 8.3.4 are on PDF 4.8.4. And also set the DASS: deploymentmanager/orchestrator/managed_by_5x/enabled to true. Refer to Step 5 of configuring candidate environments here: https://community.pega.com/knowledgebase/articles/devops/85/setting-candidate-environments
Updated: 25 Aug 2021 14:27 EDT
Tech Mahindra
CA
@konda Thank you konda for your reply.
I just want to check you on more thing. The Devops instance is frequently resetting and showing the Deployment Manager initial setup error message. The error will be gone after few days automatically. I am not sure why it is happening but i observed it is happening frequently.
Dev Ops Env is on 8.5.2 and PDF is 5.1.1
Pegasystems Inc.
IN
@maheshmadi This definitely appears like a bug either with the platform or deployment manager. Please follow up with a support ticket.
Updated: 25 Aug 2021 14:27 EDT
Pegasystems Inc.
US
how do you archive a pipeline? why would someone want to archive a pipeline and can it be made active again once archived?
Updated: 25 Aug 2021 14:27 EDT
Pegasystems Inc.
IN
@NASEB Hi Bill, from the pipelines action menu there is an option to archive a pipeline. We would typically archive a pipeline if there is no active development or hotfixes being promoted with a pipeline, usually happens after a couple of production releases. And yes we can activate a pipeline that is archived. You will have this option to activate on an archived pipeline.
Updated: 25 Aug 2021 14:27 EDT
Infosys Ltd
IN
When we do deployment using deployment manager, we generally see more then one entry deployed via PDC (see image)
But when we deploy it manually, only single entry is added.
Could you please share more insight and benefit of having multiple entries shown while deploying using Deployment manager
Thanks in advance
Updated: 25 Aug 2021 14:27 EDT
Accenture
GB
@konda - Hi, Greetings. We are using Deployment Manager v5 on Pega v8.5.4. At the moment, if we include a manual approval task at any stage, we can only add 1 user and no option to assign a workbasket. And during a deployment, Pipeline gets locked and we cannot edit this however what will be the options available when the user who is named on the approval stage is not available and if we have to use another person to do the approval mid-way of an ongoing deployment?
Regards,
Bharat
Pegasystems Inc.
IN
@KOMARINA Deployment manager as of now has the limitation of allowing only one user to be specified for manual approval task. It is on our road map to enhance this to be able to specify a group of users.
Having said that for your use case, in deployment manager 5.x, we have two privileges which control the approval access.
Approve/Reject : Which allows the user assigned to the task to approve or reject the manual task
Admin approval: Which allows users with this privilege to approve any task in the pipelines accessible to the role even if not explicitly assigned
You can have someone with admin approval access approve a manual task in the absence of the task approver.
You could also leverage the multi-speed deployment feature to not hold the pipeline with just one deployment, by moving the manual task into a stage after manual transition. Refer to this for details on multi-speed deployments: https://community.pega.com/knowledgebase/articles/devops/86/using-multispeed-deployments
Pegasystems Inc.
IN
@mahesh.k Interesting observation. I don't see any benefits of having multiple entries for the same archive import. Deployment manager uses the underlying platform API's to do the actual import, but in addition we also leverage the same API's to do the checks for aged updates, schema changes, draft flows etc. my initial guess is these checks are causing additional alerts to be sent to PDC.
Thank you for point this out, we will investigate and make appropriate changes as needed.
Accenture
GB
@konda , Hi, I have same question as Mahesh, i noticed that in PDC we can see multiple entries when deployed via DM but only 1 entry when deployed via Designer Studio, any insights into this?
Regards,
Bharat
Pegasystems Inc.
IN
@KOMARINA As I mentioned above, we will investigate this and make appropriate product changes to get a consistent behavior with deployment manager deployments as well.
Pegasystems Inc.
US
And we come to an end of another successful Ask the Expert session!
Huge thanks to everyone who asked a question (or two) and to our expert @konda Anil!
Don't forget to sign up for email notifications in My Pega > My Preferences in Collaboration Center > Speciality tags > Ask the Expert to be alerted when we have new sessions. Also check out our Ask the Expert homepage for our upcoming calendar!
Next month is Robotics with @ThomasSasnett!