Welcome
Welcome to the HCL™ Accelerate version 4.0.x documentation, where you can find information about how to install, maintain, and use HCL Accelerate.
Release Information
This document contains information about what's new, bug fixes, known issues, and upgrade notes.
What's new
This release of HCL™ Accelerate includes various bug fixes and enhancements. This release is recommended for all customers. This topic provides a summary of enhancements and bug fixes.
Getting Started
This document provides an overview of HCL™ Accelerate.
System Requirements
This document contains information about hardware and software requirements for HCL™ Accelerate.
High-Level Overview
Use HCL™ Accelerate to automate your release lifecycle and manage your DevOps value streams.
Key to product editions
HCL™ Accelerate is available in several editions.
Introduction to releases and pipelines
A release represents the delivery of multiple applications through one or more phases of a life cycle. A typical release includes many deployments to test environments and a small number of highly orchestrated deployments to staging and production. Release managers can define milestones that lead up to the release, as well as a plan to deliver participating applications to each phase of the life cycle.
Home page
Use the Home page to view value streams, releases, and insights defined in your environment.
HCL™ Accelerate GDPR statement
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been adopted by the European Union (EU) and applies from May 25, 2018.
Learning
Learn how to complete frequently-used tasks such as creating value streams.
Create a value stream
In this tutorial, we integrate Jira work items into a value stream and control value stream data with DevOps query language (DQL) queries.
Linking value stream tools
In this tutorial, you integrate the popular tools Git and Jira into a value stream and link them together.
Implementing custom metrics
In this tutorial, you create a custom metric definition and use it to provide data to HCL™ Accelerate.
Installing on Docker Compose
Install HCL™ Accelerate on the Docker Compose container orchestrator.
Installing on Kubernetes
HCL™ Accelerate is designed as a containerized application and can be installed in a Kubernetes cluster, which is a supported platform for production instances of HCL Accelerate.
Installing on OpenShift
You can install HCL™ Accelerate on OpenShift using Helm charts.
Uninstalling the server
You can uninstall HCL™ Accelerate by stopping the server and removing the product containers.
HCL™ Accelerate plugin installations on air-gapped networks
HCL™ Accelerate plugin installations on air-gapped networks.
Upgrading a trial to a full version
Upgrade your installation to the full version.
Upgrading Docker Compose
Upgrade your Docker Compose installation.
Upgrading Kubernetes
Upgrade your Kubernetes installation.
Upgrading an OpenShift application
You can upgrade an OpenShift installation using Helm charts.
Migrating Docker Compose to Kubernetes
All production instances of HCL™ Accelerate must be installed on a Kubernetes platform. As a part of this migration, the instance of MongoDB need to be re-installed in a Kubernetes-accessible location. To migrate your MongoDB database, follow the steps below. After completion of these steps, follow the Kubernetes installation procedure to complete the installation of HCL Accelerate.
Migrating OpenShift template installation to Helm charts
Starting with HCL™ Accelerate version 3.1.0, OpenShift installation via templates is no longer supported. It is highly recommended to migrate OpenShift template installation of HCL Accelerate to Kubernetes Helm charts on your next upgrade. After the successful migration, follow the Kubernetes upgrade directions.
Administering
A default HCL™ Accelerate administrator ID is included as part of HCL Accelerate. It is used to install and complete initial configuration tasks.
Configuring an email server
Configuring an email server
Calendar settings
Use the Calendar Settings page to manage the appearance of calendar events.
Security
The HCL™ Accelerate security model is organization- and team-based. The organization is the base element; teams belong to organizations. Team members manage releases, events, and deployments. Administrators manage teams and assign users to them.
Managing licenses
Configure your license or apply a trial key.
Managing logs
Control the amount of detail sent to log files.
Administrator Guide
This guide describes how to install HCL™ Accelerate. After you install HCL Accelerate, you can perform administrative tasks such as license configuration, upgrading, migrating, managing access permissions and security. This guide is intended for system administrators.
Installing HCL™ Accelerate
To get started with HCL™ Accelerate, you must install it on any one of the container platforms. You can find information about the selection of a container platform, installation methods, and procedure for installing HCL Accelerate.
Managing Value Streams
A value stream represents the objects and activities that you employ to deliver customer value, from initial concept to final delivered project.
Creating value streams
Create a value stream and then customize it by defining phases and stages that reflect your typical workflow.
Viewing value streams
Viewing value streams using list and card view layouts.
Value stream metrics
Assess project quality, progress, and performance with the HCL™ Accelerate metric data tools.
Navigating value streams
Manage a value stream's displayed data by applying filters and queries.
DevOps query language
Use the DevOps query language to filter the information displayed in your value stream.
External YAML configuration
You can create a minimal value realization of different DevOps tools into HCL™ Accelerate quickly using external YAML configuration file.
Pipelines
Pipelines provide a streamlined method to manage the applications in your development lifecycle. With pipelines, you can auto-generate deployment plans and deploy applications versions to all environments.
Developing Data Insights
The Insights feature provides DevOps metrics for your project data.
Managing Insights dashboards
Managing Insights dashboards
Insights reports
Insights reports are generated for the data that is aggregated in the Value streams, Pipelines, and Release categories. You can generate reports by clicking a button and then shared with the required stakeholders. You can run the following insights reports in HCL™ Accelerate.
Releasing Software
A release is a repeatable plan that is used to drive deployments.
Managing a release
Use the release details page to view details about a specific release.
Managing releases
Release management is the process of planning, scheduling, and controlling software deliveries.
Archiving releases
You can archive a release to remove it from the list of releases.
Events and tags
An event represents a release-related activity that you manage with the calendar. A tag is a label that you can add to a release or an event. You can use tags to filter the Activities list on the Releases page. Tags do not appear on the calendar.
Restoring archived releases, plans, and templates
You can restore archived releases, deployment plans, and templates.
Deployment plans
A deployment plan is a container for tasks. Tasks define the activities that your team runs to complete a software deployment.
Running deployments
Complete deployments by resolving the tasks in a deployment plan.
Tasks
A task represents a business-meaningful activity that is associated with a software deployment. Each task is defined on a separate row in a deployment plan. During a deployment, you run tasks defined in the deployment plan to complete the deployment.
Properties
A deployment plan can contain user-defined properties. Properties values can be defined at design- or run-time.
Extending Product Functions
Learn how to extend the function of HCL™ Accelerate
Introducing plugins
Extend HCL™ Accelerate by configuring plugin integrations to external tools.
Preventing plugins installs in unsupported server versions
Plugin versions incompatible with HCL™ Accelerate are prevented from installing.
Creating integrations
Defining integration allows you to communicate with external tools.
Archiving integrations
Archive the no longer needed integrations.
Creating plugins
You can create your own plugins and install them in HCL™ Accelerate. After installing custom plugins, you can integrate them in your releases, reports, and value streams.
Managing native integrations
Native integrations add external functionality to releases, deployment plans, and pipelines.
Migrating integrations
Migrate the legacy plug-in integrations to new plug-in integrations.
How to
The topics in this section describe how to work with HCL™ Accelerate features. Tutorials and workbooks are available for users of all experience levels.
Accessing the user interface
The user interface provides access to reports.
Creating reports
Use the Home page to create one of the following reports.
Sharing reports
You can share reports with others in your organization and who are authenticated to HCL™ Accelerate. By default, you see only the reports that you create.
Troubleshooting
Before you contacting support, gather background information and perform tasks that will assist in solving the problem. It helps to be as specific as possible and include all relevant information.
Types of problems and checks to perform
This topic contains tips for troubleshooting