The LS Insight onboarding process differs slightly depending on your environment setup. Currently, there are three different setup options and for each of these options there is a special onboarding wizard that goes through all setup steps needed to get LS Insight up and running with your instance of LS Central.
LS Central on-premises or on Azure VM and LS Insight in Azure
LS Central on-premises or on Azure VM and LS Insight database on-premises
LS Central SaaS and LS Insight in Azure
The first few pages of each onboarding wizard explain the prerequisites that need to be in place before you start the LS Insight onboarding process and the reasons for these prerequisites. Here it is explained what hardware and software is needed in the setup process and what external accounts you need to create and subscribe to. Everything mentioned in these pages will be used at some point in the onboarding process.
There is also a short general overview of the Prerequisites that you can review before you start, but the onboarding wizards explain each point in more detail.
The three different options for setting up LS Insight are based on your LS Central environment and the location where you want to create the LS Insight data warehouse. Different LS Central versions are handled within each onboarding wizard.
Note:If you are partner and would like to setup LS Insight and use the LS Central demo data VM as the source you can use either of the LS Central on-premises onboarding wizards depending on where you want to setup the LS Insight database. Please not that the path to the LS Central server on the VM is LSCENTRAL\SQLEXPRESS.
LS Central on-premises or on Azure VM and LS Insight in Azure
This is the standard setup for LS Insight for customers with LS Central on-premises. All previous versions of LS Insight used this type of setup.
When this setup is used the onboarding process creates an LS Insight SQL server, database, and Azure Data Factory in Azure. A gateway must also be set up to connect to the LS Central source database from Azure.
If you have LS Central running on a Virtual Machine in Azure, this on-premises setup applies as the LS Central source database can be accessed directly on the virtual machine.
The overview page of the onboarding wizard explains the setup in more detail.
LS Central on-premises or on Azure VM and LS Insight database on-premises
This option is for customers who want to set up the LS Insight database on an existing on-premises SQL server, and thereby save the cost of setting up an Azure SQL server and database. This setup does not, however, eliminate the need for an Azure account, because the Azure data factory is still set up in Azure to manage the data pipelines, moving data from the LS Central source database to the LS Insight database.
The overview page of the onboarding wizard explains the setup in more detail.
LS Central SaaS and LS Insight in Azure
This setup option has been added to allow customers running LS Central SaaS to connect to LS Insight and take advantage of the insight this offers. Since LS Central in cloud does not support direct database access, an option has been added to the onboarding process, to replicate data through web services. This replication is done by another LS Retail product called the Data Director that can only be set up and run from a virtual or a physical machine, preventing this setup from being completely in the cloud.
This setup works with LS Central version 17.0 and later.
The overview page of the onboarding wizard explains the setup in more detail.