System Requirements

Overview

The easiest way to ensure the smooth implementation of your analytics system is to fully understand the requirements of the system and prepare as much in advance as possible.

This article covers everything you need to know about preparing for an install of AppsAnywhere Analytics

1. Ensuring you have sufficient server resources

2. Creating the relevant DNS records

3. Enable Server Communications

4. Preparing SSL certificates

5. Creating the databases and database users

6. Preparing for the growth of the analytics database

7. Setting up a backup policy

Networking

The appliance by default has its network adapter disabled. Use the Appliance Configuration Console as detailed in the First-time Configuration section to enable networking and configure the required IPv4 settings.

DNS and SSL

In order to prepare for installation of Analytics, the following are required:

1. A fully-qualified DNS entry for the sever

2. A valid SSL certificate

Firewall

The analytics server appliance has its own firewall enabled by default which restricts communications to only those that are required. 

For information on all communications that will go in and out of the analytics server, see the Server Communications article. 

If you have any additional firewall requirements, these should be implemented at a network level. 

Database Requirements

Overview

AppsAnywhere Analytics uses a completely separate database for analytics data and does not read or write any information to the main AppsAnywhere database.

The new analytics database will consist of:

1. Data tables - store the actual information used by analytics. These will grow incrementally over time

2. Scratch tables - temporary tables that are generated by analytics server to make it easier to calculate more complicated result sets. Many of these will be re-built entirely each day

We recommend creating a new database user, specifically for use by AppsAnywhere analytics, with the following permissions

• READ access to the appsanywhere database (the main product database)

• READ/WRITE access to the appsanywhere_analytics database

• READ/WRITE/EXEC on the analytics_cache database/schema

This section of the documentation will detail exactly how to set everything up in advance of the installation and everything else you need to know about the analytics database.

Creating the database

For the installation of AppsAnywhere Analytics to proceed, you will need to create the database container, database login and assign the correct permissions by following Database Requirements .

Backups

Only historical usage information is stored in the analytics database so a complete loss of data would not effect the operation of AppsAnywhere itself. 

However, we would obviously recommend you implement a backup strategy for your analytics data so that this is not lost in the event of a loss of the analytics database. 

We recommend a nightly, full backup of the database with a 7-day retention policy. 

High Availability

As AppsAnywhere Analytics captures data of every launch initiated through AppsAnywhere, the analytics database must be available at all times for the system to operate.

We strongly recommend that the analytics database should be installed alongside the main AppsAnywhere database in a high-availability, clustered database environment.

Next Step

Once the system requirements have been configured, the next step is Deploying Analytics .