Self Managed Checklist

This document breaks the adoption process for Self-Managed GRAX into distinct steps for easier tracking. It attempts to cover both the existing and net-new customer processes as well as possible; steps that apply to only one of the two are labeled as such.

Overview

Interest / Business Case Discussion
Technical Stakeholders Discussion
Customer Approvals and Resource Identification
Environment Identification
Infrastructure Provisioning
UAT Validation
Production Validation
Longterm Support

Details

Interest and Business Case Discussion

All product adoptions start with customer interest. This call maybe take place during your pre-sales process with GRAX Sales, or may result from inquiries from existing customers. The purpose of this call is to discuss the high level value-proposition and responsibilities of Self-Managed GRAX.

Technical Stakeholders Discussion

GRAX cannot be implemented without technical stakeholders. This call is a deep-dive on implementation, architecture, security, support, and performance. It also serves as an introduction of GRAX engineering resources to the customer teams that are directly responsible for provisioning and maintenance of the GRAX infrastructure. Strong buy-in from technical resources is critical to ensuring success with Self-Managed GRAX.

Customer Approvals and Resource Identifications

Following an initial technical discussion, the customer pursues any final approvals for implementation, including security approvals for provisioning of GRAX infrastructure and installation of the app. The customer must also provide written documentation of stakeholders, including technical owners and those responsible for moving the deployment towards completion.

Environment Identification

Most customers arrive with a public cloud provider in mind; documenting that for the project team is important. Customer must inform GRAX of intended installation environment (AWS, Azure, GCP, Heroku, etc.). Customer should identify/provision the specific account/environment to be used to house GRAX during this period.

Customers should also identify the domain names to be used for the GRAX applications and ensure the related registrations are in line with the documented installation steps.

Infrastructure Provisioning

Next, the customer should provision all GRAX resources in the identified environment. If using GRAX-provided templates, GRAX can assist during roll-out. The GRAX software and supporting configuration should be installed on the compute resources as part of this process. Repeatable, and automated processes via IaC/templates are recommended for setting up the GRAX software to avoid downtime and configuration issues.

UAT Validation

UAT applications are most commonly connected to Salesforce full-copy sandboxes for validation. Validation is best approached gradually, to avoid delays caused by waiting on large operations to find small issues. For example, single record archives and restores help unveil missing permissions the same way that a 10,000 record restore would but in less time.

Our recommended validation process is thus:

Ensure no permissions warnings exist
Enable Auto Backup
Let Auto Backup finish
Archive a single record (and its hierarchy)
Review archive impact, outcome
Restore the archived record (and its hierarchy)
Review restore impact, outcome
Archive 1000 records (and hierarchy)
Review archive impact, outcome
Restore archived records (and hierarchy)
If applicable, enable History Stream for feature validation
If applicable, configure GRAX Embedded for feature validation

Production Validation

Production validation takes place after the production infrastructure is connected to your production Salesforce instance. The ability to delete large sets of data is restricted in these environments, so testing is strictly intended to ensure permissions are set as expected and the product functions correctly in the new environment.

As such, we recommend a reduced list of validation steps:

Ensure no permissions warnings exist
Enable Auto Backup
Let Auto Backup finish
Archive a single record (and its hierarchy)
Review archive impact, outcome
Restore the archived record (and its hierarchy)
Review restore impact, outcome

Longterm Support

Once GRAX is running in production and validations are complete, GRAX transitions the project team to other projects and assigns longterm support teams to handle any further issues.