Randall Groncki

Common language and terms surrounding Insights is a problem.   This post is an attempt to standardize terms for clearer, quicker communication.

Why?

During a recent conference call, we had a Babel of terms about PeopleSoft and Insights objects.  There were about 30 people on the call from all over the country kicking off a project to create some very complex Insights Dashboards.   Our biggest obstacle was our own words: 

• Dashboard
• Chart
• Fields
• Graph
• Widget
• Tile
• “Thing-a-ma-jig”
• Home Page
• … and worse

We wasted so much time just trying to understand each other because there was no common understanding of terms.

If we can all use a common set of terms, we can understand each other quicker resulting in a better, faster solution.

Agenda

• PeopleSoft Terms
• Insights Terms
• PeopleSoft Navigation Security
• PeopleSoft Row Level Security
• PeopleSoft/Insights Relationship
• Insights Security

Whose Terms?

Conceptual Idea: Things and Containers

This is a metaphor I’ll use for the rest of this post to help explain PeopleSoft Organization and Security

PeopleSoft Terms

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Insights Terms

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Data Set

• A Data Set is defined by a Search Definition
• Contains the actual data for analysis
• Controls Security
  • None
  • Role
  • Document (role level security)
• Data is generated in PeopleSoft (scheduled)
• Then Sent to OpenSearch
• Flattened, indexed data

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PeopleSoft Security

Navigation Security

• Navigation Security controls where a user can go in the application
• This is “Menu” security
• Applied at every container level object
• Users do not see options they are not granted access
  • Users may be granted access to a Home Page, but will only see Tiles they are granted access
  • Users may see a Navigation Collection, but only see links to dashboards they have been granted access

Row Level Security

• Controls what individual data items can a specific user access
• A user will not see data which they do not have access
• Row Level Security is different in the different applications

A user needs both

• Navigation and Row Level security are both important
• User needs BOTH to interact with the system
  • A user may be granted access to a page (Navigation Security), but may not be able to see any data (Row Level Security)
  • A user may be able to see employee data (Row Level Security), but does not have access to a specific page (Navigation Security)
• The user can only see data on a page when they have both security access to that page and security to the data in that page.

PeopleSoft/Insights Relationship

Two separate architectures connected by APIs

Interaction

• PeopleSoft Provides the user’s data access keys to Insights (API link)
• Insights opens the requested dashboard and loads the visualizations with data as per security configuration
  • If Row Level Security, Insights compares the user’s Security Keys Vs every document in that dataset to determine if that document is permitted to the user
  • Every document (row of data) has a list of security keys granting access to THAT row
• The visualizations builds with only the allowed data rows

Identification

• Insights has no idea WHO the current PeopleSoft user is
  • Only data access keys passed by PeopleSoft
• Dashboards (containers) are not controlled by security
• Visualizations (Things) are not controlled by security
• The data displayed IS controlled by security
• It is possible for a user to see a dashboard with empty visualizations because that user does not have row level security access to any data in that data set

Result

If all security levels are satisfied, the user sees the dashboard populated with data

Insights Security

• A Data Set is generated in PeopleSoft and ingested by OpenSearch for use in Insights
• Row Level Security is determined at the time of data generation in PeopleSoft
• Each row of data is called a “Document”
  • Each document has a list of access keys granting access to that document
• The data is stored in OpenSearch. 
  • All data selection, sorting & filtering is done on the OpenSearch Servers
    • OpenSearch Architecture is built for search
  • This relieves the load from the PeopleSoft Servers
  • PeopleSoft Architecture is built for transaction processing (OLTP)

Analytic Functions and Security

• Functions link Min(), Max(), Count(), etc. Only work on the documents allowed through row level security
  • A count of the documents returns a count of only the documents that user has access
  • The Latest Update Date Time value is the latest date time in that subset of documents the user has access
• Example:
  • A Metric showing the latest updated time of the data will show the latest update time of only the documents allowed to that user through security
  • If there is a more recent time stamp in a document not granted that user, that user will not see that later value