Here's another great tip from Alyson Powell Erwin in the PPS planning team.

When integrating PerformancePoint Planning with PerformancePoint Monitoring, you need to keep the following in mind:

  • PerformancePoint Planning cubes are recreated in each environment that they are placed into, causing the member unique keys to change upon an environment change. For example, when moving from a development environment to a test environment or production environment.
  • PerformancePoint Monitoring and Analytics stores and queries by member unique names in all of the KPI, Parameter and Analytic Views. As do many other front end client tools for SSAS cubes.

The result of the above behaviors, is such that if you have created PerformancePoint Monitoring Scorecards and Dashboards, these cannot be transferred from one environment to another easily. In order to transfer scorecards and dashboards from a test environment to a production environment, you will have to recreate all KPIs, Parameters and Analytic Views so that the correct member unique keys are now stored in the new definitions.

This results in a great deal of rework and for this reason we are recommending the following when working in an integrated environment:

  • Planning cubes should be created and tested in your development or test environment and then promoted to production when ready. Once your planning cubes are already in production, we recommend that you then create scorecards and dashboards with the PerformancePoint Monitoring product. If needed, these can be created based off of the production cubes and stored in test or development PerformancePoint Monitoring environments. Once these scorecards and dashboards are ready for production, copy the PerformancePoint Monitoring workspace files to your production Monitoring environment. This will ensure that your keys are accurate.

As an additional note, the planning team are currently working on a utility that can be used to migrate Monitoring dashboards based on Planning cubes from one environment to another – we hope to have it complete and available soon. However, as a best practice, we recommend the scenario outlined above for a smooth and seamless transition.