Pulse includes automatic source control and change tracking as one of its core features. All changes in your IBM Planning Analytics (TM1) system can now be automatically logged to the internal Pulse source repository. These changes are identified by author, the person who made the change or executed the change via a Turbo Integrator process or chore, as well as the exact time the change occurred. 

Knowing this information is paradigm shift for TM1 developers and administrators, it means that you can:

• Identify changes over a given time frame or by user. This means you KNOW what to promote to your production environment using Pulse Migration. No more guessing, looking at date stamps or change log spreadsheets.
• Identify changes not only in rules and processes but also cube structure, dimensions and dimension data (elements and attributes).
• Use the built in diff tools to identify the lines of code that have been changed.
• Export snapshots of the state of your system at any point of time.

By default, Pulse is going to check for changes every 30 seconds, you can update this value in Administration > Instance Settings:

Pulse 6 is using the REST API to track changes and Pulse 5 is using the C API. When using Architect/Perspectives for your development, Pulse 6 might not always find the correct author (and therefore flag the change as SYSTEM) because Architect/Perspectives are using the C API. When Pulse 6 is installed, you should be using PAW or Arc for your development.

The SYSTEM user is used in change tracking when the actual user can’t be identified or the documentation process is run, i.e. changes happened offline by copying files into the data directory.

• Configuring change tracking
• Include elements and attributes in source control
• Show all history of an object and how to rollback changes
• Filter by object type and date
• Exporting changes by users to CSV
• How Change Tracking gives you more confidence to do more TM1 development