Enterprise Performance Management Cloud Change Management – Overview and Best Practices

Thank you to Terry Harber and Chris West for presenting on this topic. Watch the Customer Connect recording and download a copy of the presentation from there, too!

The webinar covered the following topics:

  • Change management responsibilities
  • Understanding the change management cycle
    • Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Cloud updates
    • Infrastructure maintenance
  • Readiness and best practices for EPM Cloud monthly update

Change Management Responsibilities

  • Oracle is responsible for the change management process involved in updating the software and configuration of all environments. Any issue caused as the result of this process is defined as a regression.
  • You are responsible for the change management of custom artifacts such as dimensions, forms and reports in all environments. The migration of artifacts from one environment to another is a self-service operation.

EPM Cloud Update Types

  • Monthly Updates – Contains a set of features, bug fixes and optimizations for all instances of all EPM Cloud services. Applied to the test environment of the service the first Friday of the month during the next Automated Maintenance Window  (AMW) following a patch release. Typically production environments are patched the third Friday of the month.
  • Weekly Patch – Includes bug fixes, mainly for fixing regression bugs found in test environments, if required. Applied to all test environments on the second Friday of the month during the Automated Maintenance Window (AMW).
  • One-Off Patch – Contains fixes for regression bugs, customer blocking bugs, or new features. One-off patches are applied to specific test  environments on request. Customers whose environments are updated with a one-off patch must test the updated environments and provide approval to  apply the patch to production environments. Subsequently, Oracle applies the one-off patch to their production environments.
  • Emergency Patch – If Oracle identifies a critical bug that requires an immediate fix, both Test and Production environments may be patched without  notification during the AMW (Automated Maintenance Window) which can be set by the Service Administrator to avoid Service  disruption.

Infrastructure maintenance

  • Periodically, Oracle performs  infrastructure maintenance that may  affect your environment. This maintenance is separate from the  EPM Cloud updates and happens outside  the AMW.
  • Oracle notifies the service administrators  of planned infrastructure maintenance via email and the Infrastructure Classic  Console or Applications Console.
  • Service administrators can also subscribe  to notifications for planned outage,  unplanned outage, security, or product  from the Notification Preferences page of  the console.

Helpful Resources on EPM Cloud Change Management: