Efecte Provisioning Engine is one of the Efecte Cloud components. It provides multiple different connectors and provisioning functions to Efecte solutions, build on top of Efecte Service Management Platform.

Discover the new features and enhancements included in the Efecte Provisioning Engine  2024.2.0 release. 

Executive summary 

The 2024.2 version of the EPE solution redesigns the entire user interface and makes it easier to use. Introduces new connector for Generic SQL and new features for managing local users.

EPE connector page renewal 

In this article is described changes to EPE Admin page when new Efecte provisioning engine is updated. The EPE Connector Admin users can now enjoy a modern user interface for viewing and editing EPE connectors.  

Connectors tab 

Efecte Provisioning Engine tab is renamed from IGA to Connectors. This change has been made to clarify that the connectors are not only for the IGA solution but some are also available for ITSM customers.

Connector management is divided into four tabs: Overview, Authentication, Logs and Settings.

In Overview you can see all the Efecte connectors. The Admin User can see their status, type and how many scheduled or event tasks are associated with them.

Authentication tab is for creating and updating authentication tasks. Provisioning task for authentication is needed for Efecte Secure Access to be able to define which Customers end-users can access to Efecte login page. 

Logs tab is for downloading  EPE and ESA logs from UI.

Settings tabs is used for monitoring environments with connectors. Options for Environment type are DEV, TEST, DEMO and PROD. What we are monitoring:

• Failures in Scheduled based provisioning (extracting data, exporting data to ESM, outdated certificates, incorrect passwords, incorrect search base/filter, incorrect mappings, ect.)
• Failures in event based provisioning (fail to write to AD/Azure, etc.)
• Event-based provisioning - which customers are using what functionalities
• ESA more than ten failed login attempts to one user in past 3 days
   

Other improvements in addition to the new UI

The Admin user does not need to enter the connection settings for Directory more than once. Previously, these had to be defined for each task separately.

Connector views can be sorted and filtered. Previously this was not possible for the connectors. This feature makes it easier to manage connectors.

The new interface gives the Admin user clearer error messages. It is easier for the user to correct errors and the interface guides the user to make the right decisions. 

Workflow relations can be viewed from the new UI. This makes it easy for the Connector administrator to see how changes to a task affect the configuration. 

Summary: This EPE UI change will affect the user interface of the admin page. It does not affect existing technologies and supported use cases. 
 

Failure template configuration

If existing scheduled task is using failure template settings those must be defined again. We have improved our handling for those and this manual work must be done. 

This is an optional setting for failure handling, if scheduled task fails it can create data card to Efecte ESM that displays the error. If failure settings are defined , the administrator does not need to manually check the status of scheduled tasks.

• Failure template - Select a Template of datacard which will be created in case of any errors during provisioning (connection to data sources,timeouts,etc.)
• Failure folder - Select folder where failure data card is stored. 
• Failure attribute - Select an attribute where in the Failure Template should the error information be stored in.

 

New Connector Generic SQL

The EPE 2024.2.0 release introduces capability to connect between Generic SQL (Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL) via Efecte provisioning engine.

EPE Administrators are able configure connection to SQL database using the EPE admin UI.

New features for managing local users

This release introduces capability to update ESM local user's roles and manage password via workflow orchestration node and track last login date. These provisioning features enables ESM local user lifecycle management. 

First time password for the local user in ESM is optional in workflow orchestration node. Admin can choose if the local user is forced to change password or not. 

You can find the complete list of improvements and fixes included within the 2024.2 EPE release below.

EPE Release Notes 2024.2

Features

Change ID	Description	Notes
IGA-6944	New Connector Generic Database	Read more from the community.
IGA-5753	Expand connector possibility update ESM local user's roles	Read more from the community.
IGA-5720	Expand connector to import user photo from directory	Scheduled EPE task is supporting External reference field with upload handler. User Picture can be fetched from directory and extracted to the external field. Supported directories are Active directory and Entra ID
IGA-5666	EPE new UI	Read more from the community.
IGA-5413	EPE store user last ESM login date to ESM	Read more from the community.

 

Enhancements 

Change ID	Description	Notes
IGA-7489/CP-8194	Improve the Data export to ESM failure message	Error message is changed from FAILED to Incorrect password for the user
IGA-7180	Headers to identity mappings	Header added to mappings, it is easier to see which one is directory attribute and which one is Efecte’s own attribute.
IGA-6817/CP-7943	Connector Entra ID to support application extension attributes	EPE setting VALIDATE_NUMBER_OF_FETCHED_ATTRIBUTES must be false to support application extension attributes.
IGA-6204	ESM Local users should be enforced to change password on first login	EPE Activity Create Local User (in ESM) contains new optional setting “Password must be changed at first login”. More info in community.
IGA-5783	Improve connector Name changes for Efecte ESM and Local ESM	Efecte ESM → Efecte connector Local ESM → Efecte local user

 

Bugs

Change ID	Description	Notes
IGA-6162	Datacard is not created by ESM to ESM connector when one of the mapped attributes is static	Fixed.
IGA-6114	Read user event based task displays message about deleting user in workflow exception field when there was no user found	Fixed.