Things to consider when upgrading from Pulse 5 to Pulse 6

This article gathers everything you should know before upgrading from Pulse 5 to Pulse 6.

• Running documentation will be slower in Pulse 6 than Pulse 5. Pulse 5 had direct access to the data directory, Pulse 6 instead uses the REST API and therefore information needs to be sent over the network.
• Pulse 6 migration packages are not compatible with Pulse 5 or earlier. Pulse 6 includes a Recreate button to recreate Pulse 5 packages into a Pulse 6 format.
• You cannot run Pulse 5 and Pulse 6 side-by-side.
• A small monitor program is required to be installed on each TM1 server. This programs provides Pulse with information about installed TM1 services and server metrics such as CPU, memory and disk space.
• The TM1 Back-up folders are now stored on the server where the Pulse Monitor is installed (more information here).
• For your development, you should be using IBM Planning Analytics Workspace or Arc as they are the only two development software using the REST API. When using Architect, Pulse 6 might not be able to find the author of the changes.

• ⚠️Minimum IBM Planning Analytics version is v2.0.8 (TM1 v11.6).⚠️
• This is a major update of Pulse. It is recommended to back-up Pulse before doing the upgrade.
• Pulse 6 uses the REST API, you need to make sure the TM1 REST API ports for all TM1 instances are open and available to Pulse.
• The Pulse 6 Quick Start Guide gathers everything that you should know before installing Pulse 6. It is highly recommended to read this document before upgrading your environment.
• To use the migration features between two Pulse servers, the Pulse version needs to be the same in the two environments.

Pulse 5 had to be installed on each TM1 server.

When working with multiple TM1 servers, you can choose between installing one Pulse 6 server that will monitor many TM1 servers or installing Pulse 6 on each server. There are many advantages of a centralized Pulse server such as:

• Pulse configuration is managed in one location.
• All information about all TM1 instances are stored in the same database.
• Migration can happen between TM1 servers without having to download from one Pulse server then to upload the package to another.
• Upgrading will be quicker as only one Pulse server will need to be upgraded.

It is recommended to install Pulse 6 on its own server. If a new server is not available, Pulse 6 can be installed on one of the TM1 servers as long as there is enough memory to run TM1 and Pulse on the same server (please refer to the Pulse 6 server requirements).

If you have to choose where to install Pulse between a DEV, TEST, and PROD server, we would recommend installing Pulse on the DEV or TEST server. The main reason is for convenience as you should have more freedom to access a DEV or TEST server than the PROD server.

More information about Pulse 6 Architecture can be found here:

• Pulse Architecture

There are three important considerations before upgrading an existing Pulse to Pulse 6:

• ⚠️Minimum IBM Planning Analytics version is v2.0.8.
• ⚠️Pulse version should be v5.8.x. If your Pulse version is v5.7.x or earlier, you will need to upgrade Pulse to Pulse v5.8.x before upgrading to Pulse 6.
• ⚠️Check Pulse server requirements.

The steps to install Pulse 6 will be different if you choose for a centralized Pulse application server or having Pulse installed on each TM1 server.

More information about how to install Pulse 6 are explained here:

• Getting started with Pulse 6

Once Pulse 6 has been installed and is connected to your TM1 servers. Do not forget to migrate the Pulse 5 history data into the new Pulse 6 database. More information in this article:

• Migrating Pulse v5 history into Pulse v6

Once Pulse 6 is running and connected to TM1. The first thing to do is to execute the documentation.

Running documentation will be slower in Pulse 6 than Pulse 5. Pulse 5 had direct access to the data directory, Pulse 6 instead uses the REST API and therefore information needs to be sent over the network.

⚠️Migration packages created with Pulse v5.x will need to be recreated in Pulse 6. Pulse 6 packages are not compatible with Pulse 5. When executing a migration where the TM1 servers are monitored by two Pulse applications, both Pulse needs to be on the same version.

Pulse 6 stores much more data than Pulse 5. If you the server’s free disk space is limited, you should update the MaximumPulseDiskSpaceGB setting in the Pulse.cfg. More information about how to manage the size of the Pulse data can be found in the following article:

• Cleansing the Pulse data

Starting with v6, the open-source version of Elasticsearch is embedded into Pulse. Elasticsearch is a search engine that helps Pulse store all the information about your TM1 application second by second. The following article gathers everything you should know about the Pulse Elasticsearch data:

• Understanding Pulse Elasticsearch data

To see a quick highlight of all new features coming with Pulse 6, please go to:

• What’s new in Pulse v6