Before starting the onboarding process for LS Insight, you need to make sure that your customer fulfills the requirements listed below.
LS Central
The customer must have an LS Central license and an active maintenance agreement with LS Retail during setup and use of LS Insight.
- LS Insight is built on top of LS Central and is only available free of charge to LS Retail partners and customers that are on active maintenance.
The customer must be on LS Central version 8.4 or later on-premises.
- LS Insight has been developed to support specific versions of LS Nav and LS Central.
- Support for LS Central 15.0 and later in-cloud has not yet been added.
The customer's LS Central setup must fulfill Microsoft Business Central requirements
- LS Insight makes the same system requirements to the LS Central database as are made for Business Central from Microsoft. These can include hardware, SQL server, and operation system requirements.
Access to machine on same domain as the LS Central SQL server
Before starting the LS Insight setup process, you should have access to a machine (virtual or on-premises) that is on the same domain as the LS Central SQL server and database that will be used as the source database in the LS Insight setup. There are two reasons for this:
1. To run the LS Insight Deployment script
If you use a machine on the customer domain that has access to the LS Central source database to run the deployment script, the script can check the connection parameters to LS Central before resources are created in Azure. This prevents errors and unnecessary cost.
To run the script, the machine should have Power Shell installed.
Note: We recommend setting up VS Code with PowerShell extension.
2. To host the Integration Runtime management gateway
We recommend that the Integration Runtime management gateway is not set up on the same machine as the SQL server is running on, but that this machine should be in the same domain as the LS Central SQL server. The machine running the gateway needs to be up and running when the pipelines are scheduled to load data from LS Central to the LS Insight DW in Azure. Otherwise, the pipelines will not run and no new data will be loaded to the warehouse.
Note: The Integration Runtime can be set up on the same machine as the LS Central SQL server, but the reason why we do not recommend this is that if the ADF pipelines are scheduled to run during operating hours, this can affect the performance of LS Central. If the pipelines are only scheduled to run after hours, every 24 hours, then it should be OK to use the SQL sever machine for the integration runtime as well, as long as the machine meets the system requirements listed below.
The hardware and system requirements follow the requirements set for the Integration Runtime by Microsoft.
External subscriptions
The customer must have or be willing to create a subscription for Power BI.
- The customer must have a Power BI Pro account subscription to be able to publish and share the Power BI reports with his organization.
The customer must have or be willing to create a subscription for Azure.
- LS Insight is set up in Azure under the customers account. The cost of a typical LS Insight system is around 100 USD a month, assuming that pipelines are run once every 24 hours to refresh the warehouse data.
- We have gathered some information about the Azure cost estimate and given an example for a standard LS Insight schedule.