Introduction
Welcome to the OneStream Administrator Handbook! If you are a OneStream administrator and reading this book, then it likely means one of two things: 1. you are incredibly dedicated and deserve a raise, or 2. something blew up and you are hopelessly desperate. Either way, you’re in luck. This book is for the admins – those hapless souls who work tirelessly behind the scenes to keep the machinery running and the end-users happy.
Collectively, this book is a compilation of decades of OneStream expertise from active consultants and ex-admins – people who have been exactly where you are now, and who understand your plight. Whether you’re new to OneStream and don’t know where to begin, or you’re already a veteran and just looking to grab some tips and tricks, we hope that this book will help you on your journey!
Introduction
Purpose
This book is intended to be used by admins responsible for maintaining existing OneStream applications. Admin tasks can be categorized into three general categories:
Fixing issues and correcting unexpected behavior.
Updating and extending an existing application.
Creating entirely new functionality.
The upcoming chapters will mainly address the first two categories since admins spend most of their time completing those types of maintenance tasks.
While these tasks may seem simple, OneStream applications are often complex, and admins may not be familiar with granular, low-level build details. Because of this, it’s often a struggle even to identify a starting point when completing maintenance requests from the business.
This book’s goal is to address the most common tasks and topics you might encounter as an admin, driven by true-life use cases. For each topic, we have compiled the relevant pieces of information from various sources that you should consider in your work and called out common pitfalls and ‘gotchas’. For example, some of the topics covered include updating security settings for users, debugging common issues when loading data into OneStream, and fixing common compilation errors when writing business rules and Member Formulas.
With this in mind, consider the following situation: it’s a Monday morning, and the first thing you see when you log on is an email from an end-user that reads, “Hey, a lot of the cells in this report are flagged as invalid now, but it was working last Friday, can you look into this?”
The issue is that OneStream – as an application – is very interconnected, and so there are dozens of different settings spread across dozens of different screens that could be causing the problem. So, where do you start?
You could search for the keyword “invalid” and scan through the OneStream Design and Reference Guide, or you could pull out this book and read the information about invalid intersections. There you would find a list of settings that affect the validity of an intersection (from your cube integration settings to conditional input business rules), which would give you a starting point of things to check right away.
Another important part of being an admin is developing and applying new business processes; for example, this might involve governance and controls. Since every company is different and OneStream is so flexible, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer to how to build these processes into your application. However, we can offer examples of how other companies and admins have resolved these problems, to give you options as to what might work based on your company’s specific requirements.
Introduction
Scope
Before continuing, let’s first set expectations regarding what this book covers and, more importantly, what it does not. The OneStream Administrator Handbook focuses on how to maintain and extend an existing application, not how to design and build an application from scratch. Many of the topics covered here are also covered elsewhere in other resources; the main difference is that we approach these topics from the perspective of the admin rather than the consultant.
For example, when discussing metadata management, this book doesn’t discuss how to gather requirements and design your application’s dimensionality to address them – that would typically be handled in the initial build by consultants. Instead, this book covers how to update and maintain metadata structures that are already in place.
Introduction
Contents
Since we fully expect you to reach for this book as an ‘as-needed’ reference, here is a short summary of each chapter so you can quickly skip to your relevant content.
| Chapter | Description |
|---|---|
| 2: Testing | This chapter covers common testing definitions, when to use different testing methods, and OneStream’s recommended testing practices. |
| 3: Application Properties | This chapter covers the global properties that are available on the Application tab in OneStream, such as enforcing a Global POV or adding currencies. |
| 4: Metadata Management | This chapter serves as a reference for updating existing metadata members or adding entirely new members. In particular, we focus on how different member settings interact, common mistakes when configuring members, and process recommendations for handling metadata updates. |
| 5: Translation | This chapter covers the foreign currency capabilities that are available in OneStream and goes over common translation-related use cases we have seen for companies. |
| 6: Work the Workflow | This chapter highlights important considerations when setting up existing or new Workflow Profiles, and how different workflow setups can be used to accommodate your business requirements and capture your business’s responsibility structure. |
| 7: Data Troubleshooting | This chapter covers techniques for validating and investigating loaded data; in other words, debugging data that is getting imported/calculated, but ‘not looking quite right.’ This includes topics such as auditing and drill-back techniques, and how to debug data that is not clearing or consolidating as expected. |
| Chapter | Description |
|---|---|
| 8: Import and Validation Errors | This chapter covers the most common import and validation errors you might encounter when loading data. |
| 9: Constraining and Locking Data | This chapter covers methods for securing your data and guaranteeing data integrity. These methods are separated into two major categories: system-level controls and process-level controls. |
| 10: Business Rules | This chapter covers techniques for maintaining and troubleshooting business rules, as well as best practices to help you write code that is robust, scalable, and easy to maintain. |
| 11: Cube Views | This chapter covers techniques and best practices for maintaining Cube Views, as well as common issues and errors such as no data access. |
| 12: Securing the Pieces | This chapter discusses the administrator’s responsibilities regarding security. It also provides a checklist of where the key security configuration properties can be found, as well as common issues such as the inability to open the application or see data. We also briefly cover some common practices for security maintenance and controls. |
| 13: Compliance and Audit | This chapter covers the administrator’s roles and responsibilities regarding compliance, which might involve providing audit reports to both internal and external audit departments. |
| 14: Business as “Usual” | This chapter highlights high-level considerations when handling common use cases that occur as a company matures and grows. For example, chart of account changes and historical restatements are two common business problems that might occur even after an application is stable. |
Figure 1.1
Introduction
References
If you are new to the OneStream ecosystem, you’ll quickly realize that there’s a lot to learn and never enough time. With that in mind, we thought it would be helpful to list various available resources, along with some quick summaries of their contents and when you might reach for them.
| Reference | Description |
|---|---|
| OneStream Design and Reference Guide | The Design and Reference Guide is one of the most useful resources. Use it when you want to confirm what any setting or button does. It also contains helpful background information on what the various OneStream engines are doing, at a high level, behind the scenes. You can access it through the Help button on the top menu bar of any OneStream application; the PDF version can also be found in the |
| OneStream Foundation Handbook by The Architect Factory | The Foundation Handbook was written to help consultants with the build and design process. While the Design and Reference Guide generally provides documentation on settings, the Foundation Handbook also gives context and examples of which settings to use and when. It is a great starting point when you are approaching any new topic in OneStream. |
| Reference | Description |
|---|---|
| The purchase of the book also entitles the buyer to a 50% discount on the OneStream Certified Professional (OCP) – Lead Architect Exam. | |
| OneStream Finance Rules and Calculations Handbook by Jon Golembiewski | The Finance Rules and Calculations Handbook offers a deeper dive into business rule writing, with a particular focus on the OneStream finance engine. If you are looking to optimize code and find best practice examples, this is a great resource. It also has sample code for some of the more common calculations you might encounter, which can often give you a good starting point if you’re unsure where to start. |
| OneStream Planning: The Why, How and When by Cameron Lackpour and Celvin Kattookaran | The OneStream Planning book delves into the details of building a Planning application. Since these types of applications are extremely rule-heavy, the book also deals a lot with writing planning-specific rules and provides a wealth of sample code. |
| OneCommunity | This site is a collection of blog posts, knowledge base posts, and forum threads for the OneStream ecosystem. If you’re thoroughly stuck, it’s often worth checking if someone has had a similar question to you at some point in the past. You can access the site at: https://community.onestream.com |
| OneStream Navigator (previously OneStream Academy) | This is OneStream’s official repository of courses and video lectures. This is a great way to study various topics; if you’re looking to get certified, there are even courses available to prepare you for the exam! You can access the site at: https://onestream.thoughtindustries.com/catalog |
| Microsoft VB.NET documentation | If you are new to VB.NET, it can be intimidating sorting through the swathe of available resources via Google. These are the official Microsoft VB.NET documentation sites, which we often refer to when writing business rules. Use the .NET API to look at available modules and methods. The Language Reference offers explanations on VB.NET syntax. Finally, the Language Features pages explain the core concepts of the language. Home page: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/ • Language Reference: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/visual-basic/language-reference/ • Language Features: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/visual-basic/programming-guide/language-features/ • .NET Standard Guide: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/ • .NET Framework Guide: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/ • .NET API: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/?view=netframework-4.8 |
| OneStream API Details and Documentation | This provides documentation on the namespaces of the OneStream API. This is useful for figuring out the methods available to each engine, and also for seeing the available enumerations you can reference in business rules. You can find the API in the |
| Reference | Description |
|---|---|
bit). For example, for version 6.6.0, the API can be found at OneStream_6.6.0/OneStream_Doc_On_Prem_6.6.0/Document ation/OneStreamAPIDetailsAndDocumentation_6.6.0.zip |
Figure 1.2
Introduction
Disclaimer
While the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication, OneStream Press, the authors, and OneStream Software LLC do not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of any information and are not responsible for any errors or omissions or the results obtained from the use of such information.
We would also like to emphasize that any “best practices” are offered based on our experiences but won’t cover every case. In particular, examples given for subjective topics (especially business process-driven topics such as controls and security) are offered to provide you with a general idea of where to start or what is possible. It is up to you – as a world-beating administrator! – to decide whether these examples are appropriate for your company and specific use cases.
With that said, we hope that you find this book helpful in both the short and long term, so let’s get started!