Enhancing Your Anaplan Audit History Reporting with Model History Export

AnaplanOEG
AnaplanOEG
edited July 2 in Best Practices

We are excited to announce a significant upgrade to the existing Anaplan Audit History Reporting project written in Python. This project now includes the ability to export Model History. This enhancement provides a more comprehensive view of data changes within your Anaplan models, allowing for deeper analysis and better archiving capabilities.

Key Features:

  1. Inclusion of Model History Export: The Anaplan Audit History Reporting has been upgraded to include Model History Export. This new feature ensures that all changes in data within individual Anaplan modules are tracked and exportable.
  2. Tracking Changes: Anaplan Model History meticulously records all data changes in individual Anaplan modules, offering a detailed log that is essential for auditing and reviewing historical data modifications.
  3. Flexible Export: The export functionality dynamically updates the export column names in a SQLite table. This flexibility ensures compatibility and ease of integration with various data processing workflows.
  4. Offloading to Robust Databases: For enhanced analysis and archiving, it is recommended to offload the exported data to a more robust relational database. This approach facilitates extensive data analysis and long-term storage, ensuring your data is accessible and secure.
  5. Using the New Feature: To utilize this new feature, set up an Anaplan Export Action and save the Export Action from the Model History interface. The export action must be named "MODEL_HISTORY_EXPORT". Once this action is configured, the model history will be dynamically exported to a new table created in the SQLite database where the Python script executes. The table and column names will be slightly modified to ensure they are SQL-friendly.

Step-by-Step Instructions:

  1. Set Up Anaplan Export Action:
    • Navigate to the Model History interface in your Anaplan model.
    • Set up, save, and run the Export Action
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  2. Execute the Audit History Export Script:
    • When the current Audit History export process is run, the Python script automatically detects any Export Action named "MODEL_HISTORY_EXPORT" in a given Module.
      image.png
    • On the first run, once the model history has been downloaded, the script will dynamically create a new table in the SQLite database and ensure all column names are SQL-compatible.
      Note: The table and column names may differ slightly as the script will modify all Workspace, Model, Module, and Line Item names to be "SQL Compatible".
    • On subsequent runs, the SQL table may include additional columns as other Modules are included in the Model History.
      Note: Similar to the Audit History Export, it is important to run the Model History Export frequently, such as every 24 hours, to ensure the output is up-to-date.
  3. Deployment Instructions:
    • For detailed deployment instructions, please follow the guide provided in this link.
    • Please be advised that this continues to be considered a custom solution and, as such, is not directly supported by Anaplan Support.

Conclusion: By incorporating the Model History Export into your Anaplan Audit History Reporting, you gain a powerful tool for tracking, analyzing, and archiving data changes within your Anaplan models. This feature enhances the audit capabilities and ensures that your data management processes are robust and flexible.

For further details and to start using this feature, visit the Anaplan Community Discussion.

Author: Quin Eddy, @QuinE - Director of Data Integration, Operational Excellence Group (OEG)

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