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Search and reporting service

Search and Reporting Service is a feature that externalizes full-text search functionalities into an independent microservice for improved efficiency.

Pega Cloud® uses the Elasticsearch engine for full-text searches to retrieve specific data from the system, such as Rules, Assignments, attachments, or data instances. Elasticsearch is a third-party search engine that quickly finds relevant information within applications by analyzing large volumes of data. An efficient indexing mechanism makes application data searchable in near real time. 

Search and Reporting Service is a multi-tenant, cloud-based service that enables the connection of multiple Pega Platform™ environments (tenants) to the same instance of the service. The service provides options to receive requests and store and segregate data from multiple tenants.

Benefits of Search and Reporting Service

By using Search and Reporting Service instead of the embedded Elasticsearch, you gain the following benefits: 

Maintainability

  • Externalizing Search enables independent release cycles so that Pega Platform can update to the latest releases or security patches of Elasticsearch without requiring updates to Pega Platform itself. 
  • Elasticsearch no longer supports an embedded version. 

Scalability

  • Scaling embedded Elasticsearch requires scaling entire Util nodes. 
  • Independent Elasticsearch cluster enables horizontal scale-out of Elasticsearch independent of Pega Platform nodes, which results in optimal use of resources. 
  • Search and Reporting Service enables deployment on Kubernetes for High Availability even though Pega Platform is not on K8s. 

Reliability

  • Eliminates issues with potential loss of data indices when Util nodes crash. 
  • Eliminates unpredictable performance of Util nodes, as compute capacity on Util nodes is shared by Pega Platform and embedded Elasticsearch. 

Availability 

  • Externalizing search functionality into an independent microservice backed by an Elasticsearch cluster makes these features highly available with failover and scalability independent of Pega Platform. 

Updatability

  • Externalizing Elasticsearch makes rolling updates of Pega Platform more reliable. 
  • Offers bug fixes and service updates independent of the Pega Platform release cadence. 

Independent release cycle

Search and Reporting Service now has release cycles that are independent of Pega Infinity™, which results in the following outcomes: 

  • Releases for newer functionality can occur faster. 
  • Updates to support newer versions of Elasticsearch are frequent.

Security

  • Full row-level and partial property-level attribute-based access control (ABAC) security support. Row-level security requires configuration. 
  • Partial support of role-based access control (RBAC). Search returns objects restricted by RBAC, but they are inaccessible to users. 

Deployment overview of Search and Reporting Service

The infrastructure model outlines a standard containerized cloud deployment architecture of Pega Infinity, with an externalized Search and Reporting Service, as shown in the following figure. Externalizing the Search and Reporting Service involves separating the full-text search functionalities from the Pega Platform and running them as an independent microservice in the cloud. This approach enables you to scale, manage, and monitor the search service independently from the Pega nodes.

Cloud deployment of the Search and Reporting Service.

Deployment architecture patterns

Lead System Architects (LSAs) select deployment architecture patterns based on organizational requirements, technical constraints, and operational capabilities. Each pattern involves trade-offs related to isolation, resource efficiency, operational complexity, and scalability.

Pattern 1: Dedicated Search and Reporting Service for each environment

Each Pega Platform environment (development, testing, staging, and production) uses a dedicated SRS instance deployed in Kubernetes. Non-production environments typically use smaller SRS deployments with fewer replicas and smaller Elasticsearch clusters. Production environments use a fully scaled, highly available configuration.

Benefits

This deployment approach provides several advantages:

  • Maximum isolation between environments. Issues in development or testing do not affect production.
  • Ability to run different SRS versions in different environments, which enables update testing before production rollout.

Considerations

This pattern involves higher infrastructure cost and operational overhead because each SRS instance requires separate Kubernetes resources and an Elasticsearch cluster.

A dedicated SRS is ideal for organizations that require strict isolation, such as regulated industries where production data must remain segregated, or organizations with separate teams that manage environments independently.

Pattern 2: Shared multi-tenant Search and Reporting Service across non-production

A single multi-tenant SRS instance serves all non-production environments (development, testing, and staging), while production uses a dedicated SRS instance. Each non-production environment connects as a separate tenant to support data isolation.

Benefits

This approach offers the following advantages:

  • Reduced infrastructure cost compared to fully dedicated instances.
  • Maintains isolation for production search features.

Considerations

Shared non-production SRS must be sized for the combined load, which is typically less than the production load.

This pattern works well when non-production usage differs from production, such as development and testing activity during business hours versus a continuous production load.

Pattern 3: Fully shared multi-tenant Search and Reporting Service

A single multi-tenant SRS instance serves all environments, including production. Each environment connects as a separate tenant with strict data isolation enforced by SRS. The shared Kubernetes deployment and Elasticsearch cluster must handle the combined peak load.

Benefits

This approach provides the following advantages:

  • Lowest infrastructure cost and operational overhead.
  • Only one SRS deployment to monitor, maintain, and upgrade.

Considerations

Review these factors before selecting this pattern:

  • Requires advanced capacity planning to prevent overload.
  • Performance issues or maintenance events affect all environments.

This pattern is best suited for organizations with limited infrastructure budgets, smaller scale, or mature DevOps practices. Robust monitoring and defined scaling processes are essential to manage growth and prevent cross-environment impact.

Functional use cases supported by Search and Reporting Service

Search and Reporting Service supports the following use cases:

  • Finding Case and Data Objects
    Pega developers and users can find Case and data objects that contain a given word or phrase in the values of any properties.
  • Filtering Case and Data Objects
    Pega Developers and End Users can find Case and data objects that match a single filter condition or a combination of filter conditions (compounded with AND / OR) with comparators such as =, !=, <, <=, >, >=, and between.
  • Finding Rules
    Pega developers can find Rules that contain a given word or phrase in the values of any text properties.
  • Unaggregated/summary queries
    Pega developers and users can perform unaggregated/summary queries through report definitions.
  • Enforcing security policies
    The system enforces RBAC policies defined on classes and ABAC policies defined on the properties of classes that pass as filters to the service.

Non-functional use cases supported by Search and Reporting Service

  • Multi-tenancy
    Multiple instances of Pega Infinity environments can connect to the same Search and Reporting Service instance and store data with appropriate data isolation.
  • Scalability
    Both Search and Reporting Service Pods and the AWS Elasticsearch cluster can scale independently of Pega Infinity nodes.
  • Independent release cycles
    Search and Reporting Service has a release cycle independent of  Pega Infinity, which means the Service API is backward compatible. Earlier versions of Pega Infinity can continue to use newer versions of Search and Reporting Service.

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