MicroStrategy OCF Connector: Overview

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation

The OCF connector for MicroStrategy is developed by Alation and is available as a Zip file. You can upload and install the Zip file in the Alation application.

The latest MicroStrategy OCF connector package can be downloaded from the Connector Hub on the Alation Customer Portal. Ask an Alation admin with access to the Customer Portal to download the connector from the Connectors section (Customer Portal > Connectors).

This connector should be used to catalog MicroStrategy Cloud and MicroStrategy On-premise (version 2021 and later) as a data source on Alation on-premise and Cloud Service instances. It extracts MicroStrategy objects such as projects, folders, reports, report fields, documents, dossiers, and cubes. After the metadata is extracted, it is represented in the data catalog as a hierarchy of catalog pages under the parent BI source. Alation users can leverage the full catalog functionality to search for and find the extracted metadata, curate the corresponding catalog pages, create documentation about the data source, and exchange information.

Team

The following administrators are required to install this connector:

• MicroStrategy Admin:

  • Provides the connection information

  • Provides the SSL certificate

  • Creates a service account with the necessary permissions

• Alation Server Admin:

  • Installs the connector

  • Creates a BI source

  • Configures the BI source

Scope

The table below describes which metadata objects this connector extracts and which operations are supported.

Feature	Scope	Availability
MicroStrategy BI source	The MicroStrategy instance is represented as a BI source.	Yes
Projects	Extract projects	Yes
Folders	Extract folders	Yes
Reports	Extract reports in a project.	Yes
Report prompts	Extract the prompts that appear in reports.	No
Prompted reports	Extract the prompted reports in a project.	Yes*
Report attributes	Extract reports attributes in reports.	Yes
Report metrics	Extract dimensions, measures, and measure expressions of report objects.	Yes
Report derived metrics	Extract derived metrics of reports.	No
Report owner	Extract information about the owner or author who created the report.	Yes
Report previews	Extract report previews.	No
Dossiers and documents	Extract dossiers and documents.	Yes
Dossiers or documents attribute and metrics	Extract attributes and metrics of dossiers and documents.	Yes
Dossier owner or documents owner	Extract information about the owner or author who created dossiers or documents.	Yes
Dossiers or document derived metrics	Extract derived metrics of dossiers or documents.	No
Cubes	Extract dimensions and measure of a dashboard object.	Yes
Cubes metric and attributes	Ability to show a thumbnail image of reports and dashboards.	Yes
Cubes owner	Extract information about the owners or authors who created a cube.	Yes
Connections	Extract connection objects.	Yes
Document or Document previews	Extract document or dossier preview image.	Yes
Lineage	Ability to generate lineage for the BI source including report level lineage.	Yes
Cross-System lineage	Ability to generate lineage between the BI source and a data source.	Yes

* Answering the prompts is not supported, so the extracted reports can have some missing field information.

MicroStrategy Object Hierarchy

The following diagram shows the hierarchy of MicroStrategy objects and how they are cataloged in Alation:

Connector API Methods

MicroStrategy APIs used by this connector to extract metadata are described below:

Type	API Endpoint	Description
Authentication	POST : {BaseUrl}/MicroStrategyLibrary/ api/auth/login	Get the access token for authentication.
All users	GET : {BaseUrl}/MicroStrategyLibrary/ api/users	Get all users.
User groups	GET : {BaseUrl}/MicroStrategyLibrary/ api/usergroups	Get all user groups of MicroStrategy.
All projects	GET : {BaseUrl}/MicroStrategyLibrary/ api/projects	Get the list of all projects.
All folders	GET : {BaseUrl}/MicroStrategyLibrary/api/ folders/preDefined/7 {BaseUrl}/MicroStrategyLibrary/api/ folders/preDefined/20	Gets the response of all the folders inside a project. `7 - The value 7 is used for my_folders 20 - The value 20 is used for shared_folders
Project permissions	GET : {BaseUrl}/MicroStrategyLibrary/ api/objects/$projectID?type=32	Gets permissions for a project for which the ID is passed.
All permissions	POST : {BaseUrl}/MicroStrategyLibrary/ %type_of_objects GET : {BaseUrl}/MicroStrategyLibrary/api /metadataSearches/results?searchId= %id_from_get_call	This call reach a search id with which the metadataSearch has to be called to get list of all objects and permissions.
Cubes	getCubeDefinition	Gets cubes, cube attributes and fields.
Documents and dossiers	getDossier/DocDefinition	Gets documents and dossiers definition.
Reports	getReportDefinition	Gets reports and their attributes.
Dashboards (Document or Dossier) images	exportToPDF	Gets images of documents or dossiers.
IServer Node ID	getClusterNodes	Gets the nodes of the cluster this node id will be used in subsequent Cube Cache Calls.
All Cube Caches	getAllCubeCaches	Gets all the cube cache information from which we get to know cube cache ID Filters used are cube-id.
Cube Cache by ID	getCubeCacheByID	Get the cube cache information for in-memeory published cubes from which datasource names will be extracted.
All Datasources	getAllDatasourcesAPI	Gets all the datasources of the Microstrategy instance.
Datasource by ID	getDatasourceByID	Get the datasource information from which host, port, dbType are extracted.
Cube SQLViewAPI	getCubeSQLView	Gets the SQL statement denoting the fields and tables being used in Cube.