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LS Central on-premises or on Azure VM and Analytics in Azure
LS Central on-premises or on Azure VM and Analytics database on-premises
LS Central SaaS and Analytics in Azure
LS Central SaaS with bc2adls export and Analytics in Azure - BETA
The Analytics for LS Central onboarding process differs slightly depending on your environment setup. Currently, there are four different setup options and for each of these options there is a special onboarding wizard that goes through all setup steps needed to get Analytics up and running with your instance of LS Central.
The first few pages of each onboarding wizard explain the prerequisites that need to be in place before you start the onboarding process and the reasons for these prerequisites. Here it is explained what hardware and software is needed in the setup process and what external accounts you need to create and subscribe to. Everything mentioned in these pages will be used at some point in the onboarding process.
There is also a short general overview of the Prerequisites - Before you start that you can review before you start, but the onboarding wizards explain each point in more detail.
The four different options for setting up Analytics are based on your LS Central environment, export method and the location where you want to create the data warehouse. Different LS Central versions are handled within each onboarding wizard.
Note:If you are partner and would like to setup Analytics and use the LS Central demo data VM as the source you can use either of the LS Central on-premises onboarding wizards depending on where you want to setup the Analytics database. Please note that the path to the LS Central server on the VM is LSCENTRAL\SQLEXPRESS.
LS Central on-premises or on Azure VM and Analytics in Azure
This is the standard setup platform for customers with LS Central on-premises.
When this setup is used the onboarding process creates an Analytics SQL server, database, and Azure Data Factory in Azure portal. A gateway must also be set up to connect to the LS Central source database from Azure.
If you have LS Central running on a Virtual Machine in Azure, this on-premises setup applies as the LS Central source database can be accessed directly on the virtual machine.
The overview page of the onboarding wizard explains the setup in more detail.
LS Central on-premises or on Azure VM and Analytics database on-premises
This option is for customers who want to set up the Analytics database on an existing on-premises SQL server, and thereby save the cost of setting up an Azure SQL server and database. This setup does not, however, eliminate the need for an Azure account, because the Azure data factory is still set up in Azure to manage the data pipelines, moving data from the LS Central source database to the Analytics data warehouse database.
The overview page of the onboarding wizard explains the setup in more detail.
LS Central SaaS and Analytics in Azure
This setup option has been added to allow customers running LS Central SaaS to connect to Analytics and take advantage of the insight this offers. Since LS Central SaaS does not support direct database access, an option has been added to the onboarding process, to replicate data through web services. This replication is done by another LS Retail product called the Data Director that can only be set up and run from a virtual or a physical machine, preventing this setup from being completely in the cloud.
This setup works with LS Central version 17.0 and later.
The overview page of the onboarding wizard explains the setup in more detail.
LS Central SaaS with bc2adls export and Analytics in Azure - BETA
This setup option is still in BETA release but has been added to create a pure SaaS option for our LS Central SaaS customers. This options takes advantage of the bc2adls app for exporting data from LS Central SaaS to an Azure storage account and from there we read the data into the data warehouse using Azure data factory pipelines like in the other scenarios. The data warehouse tables are exactly the same so all the report templates still work.
This setup works with LS Central version 27.0 and later.
The overview page of the onboarding wizard explains the setup in more detail.