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 allows us to horizontally scale out Elasticsearch independent of Pega Platform nodes, resulting in optimal use of resources.
- Search and Reporting Service enables deployment on Kubernetes (K8s) 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™ result 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 support of property-level attribute-based access control (ABAC) security. 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 23, 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.
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 instance of Search and Reporting Service 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.
Check your knowledge with the following interaction:
This Topic is available in the following Module:
If you are having problems with your training, please review the Pega Academy Support FAQs.
Want to help us improve this content?