Elimity Insights server
The Elimity Insights server fulfills multiple roles in a deployment of the Elimity Insights platform:
Serving the Elimity Insights web application
Serving the Elimity Insights REST API
Running various scheduled background tasks
Performing imports for built-in sources
Sending daily notifications for access review reminders and failed health checks
For SaaS customers we perform the setup and maintenance of Elimity Insights servers behind the scenes. These installation instructions are mainly useful for on-prem deployments. We strongly recommend deploying the Elimity Insights server as a container, but for existing customers we also keep supporting installations using plain executables.
Container-based installation (recommended)
We distribute all Elimity Insights releases as Docker images for both Linux and Windows Server hosts. Our recommendation for deploying these is to use your cloud provider's dedicated-VM-for-container solution (e.g. Google Cloud Containers on Compute Engine, Azure Container Instances, ...) and combining it with their product for HTTP(S) proxying (e.g. Google Cloud Load Balancing, Azure Load Balancer). Note that we don't support deploying Elimity Insights using services like Google Cloud Run and Azure Container Apps (but we do recommend these for gateways and import agents). The main reason is that Elimity Insights servers currently do not match most cloud providers' definition of a microservice:
Elimity Insights servers build a cache on startup which might take a while.
Elimity Insights servers do not support horizontal scaling.
Elimity Insights servers perform long-running tasks in the background.
Services like Google Cloud Containers on Compute Engine and Azure Container Instances however are a perfect fit for Elimity Insights servers:
No manual VM management
Great integration with your cloud provider's key vault for mounting secrets
Configuration / monitoring / upgrades via your cloud provider's user-friendly UI
We also support deploying manually on e.g. Windows Server if using your cloud provider's dedicated-VM-for-container solution is not an option. In either case please refer to our documentation about working with containers for detailed setup instructions. Visit https://console.cloud.google.com/artifacts/docker/elimity-general/europe-west1/docker/insights to get a list of available image tags.
Executable-based installation
If the container-based installation is not an option for you, then deploying a plain Elimity Insights server executable is another approach we support. In this case you'll probably need to consider performing some additional setup steps:
Ensure the server restarts automatically and runs continuously in the background, e.g. as a Linux / Windows service.
Configure a logging file for the server so you can easily inspect logs later.
Set up log rotation to avoid running out of disk space.
Upgrades
Upgrading an Elimity Insights deployment typically requires performing the following steps:
Shutting down the old server
Backing up your database
Performing database migrations (not applicable for patch upgrades)
Updating the server (simply bumping image version for container-based installations)
Starting the updated server
For database migrations we also provide both OCI images and plain executables. As usual, we recommend using a CaaS solution like Google Cloud Run or Azure Container Apps to perform database migrations as a one-off job. You can also run the image manually using the Docker CLI:
Visit https://console.cloud.google.com/artifacts/docker/elimity-general/europe-west1/docker/insights-database-migrate to get a list of available tags for this specific image.
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