What is a one sentence summary of your feature request?
Bulk add/link top level policies/XML data files to an EPM Cloud company group while maintaining a specific policy link order
Please describe your idea in detail. What is your problem, why do you feel this idea is the best solution, etc.
We are 100% EPM Cloud. We consistently find ourselves troubleshooting various “what if,” “this is weird,” “I wonder how this will change everything,” “how can we improve this,” etc. types of scenarios. We have test environments/test company groups, but we also share the EPM workload among a few people. As such, we can have multiple people working on different solutions. A single company group dedicated to testing is not always sufficient because we might be working on separate issues and don’t want to step on each others’ toes. Maintaining and verifying which test company group has parity with production is also… annoying… for multiple reasons. Ideally, I would love to be able to create a test company group for a specific reason, bulk add/link/mirror production top level policies, then remove said test group when finished. At the end of the day, the ability to copy/mirror a specific company group (minus the computer memberships) would also suffice. The final solution for this request would probably also include a bulk export of a company group’s linked top level policies/XML data files with their respective policy link order.
How do you currently solve the challenges you have by not having this feature?
I am currently exporting/copying the policy link order to Excel, comparing with the current test group, then updating or changing policies as needed. If the test company group is mostly accurate, then it’s not that big of a deal. However, recreating a new test group is painstakingly laborious to make sure it has parity with production.
Note there are two locations and two types of link orders.. I’ll mark them as 1 and 2 here…
The left one (1) is multiple policies affecting a group of machines.
The right one (2) is policies of a specific type, wrapped up as a bundle.. in this case.. admin Templates manager policies.
I think I get what you want: You want to “Photocopy the Bakery group with its 16 policies”… then Replace Hwello123 policy with another one .. keeping the link order where Hwello123 is in the left order… and “see how it reacts.”
Stop: Do I have it right?
Then, also as a stopgap measure, note that INSIDE a policy you can “Replace ALL from XML” and keep Hwello123 in its existing link order but replace all the guts of Hwello123 with whatever you want.
“Photocopying” the company group with all of its top level policies is the main desire. It doesn’t have to copy the child groups and their respective linked policies, as repeating the “photocopy process” and moving child groups would be easy enough. Then, yes, the end goal is manipulating the photocopied company group’s linked policies so we know how it will behave in production, setting up testing groups for various business units during troubleshooting, testing resolutions during Netwrix support cases, etc.
A tangential desire for something like a “bulk add/link this list of top level policies/XML data files to this company group in this order” as opposed to a “click this button to copy this company group” solution is related to disaster recovery. I already download and backup our XML data files. I also assume everything from a company configuration standpoint (company groups, linked policies, etc.) is backed up in various ways and the risk of just losing everything is astronomically low, but our InfoSec resiliency folks like hearing concrete answers BUT! I also understand something like this is a lot easier said than done
BUT! I also understand something like this is a lot easier said than done