Set up the Tosca Administration Console

The Tosca Administration Console gives your QA teams an efficient and scalable environment where they can work with various products across the Tricentis portfolio.

This topic is for administrators who are in charge of setting up this infrastructure. It takes you through the console's architecture, important considerations, and the basic setup workflow.

Architecture

The Tosca Administration Console is a bundle of services that are part of the Tosca Server installation:

  • Project service, which hosts your projects and fetches project information.

  • Authentication service, which manages user access to projects.

  • Migration service, which handles schema and XEngine migrations.

These services are interconnected. If you start, stop, or restart one service, you automatically start, stop, or restart all services.

Considerations

The Tosca Administration Console is a prerequisite for a number of important Tricentis Tosca features.

One of them is Tricentis User Administration, which you can use for authentication or authorization:

  • For authentication, you don't need projects in the Tosca Administration Console, only users in Tricentis User Administration. This means that for authentication, you don't need the Tosca Administration Console.

  • For authorization, you do need projects in the console, so you can define which users have access to which projects. This means that for authorization, you need the Tosca Administration Console.

For all other features connected to the Tosca Administration Console, you must have a project in the console:

As soon as you have a project in the console, you have to set up Tricentis User Administration for authorization. If you don't, testers don't have access to your project.

Since you use Tricentis User Administration for authorization, you need to use Tricentis Server Repository workspaces. This includes non-user workspaces like the qTest workspace or the AOS workspace.

Basic workflow

You understand what the Tosca Administration Console is, how it works, and which features you need. Now, let's talk about your workflow.

The workflow we've outlined here is meant to give you a quick overview of various puzzle pieces, so you know what you need to have ready when. It's not a comprehensive install guide for all features connected to the Tosca Administration Console.

To set up your basic infrastructure, follow these steps:

  1. Prepare your database(s):

    • Prepare the database for your Tosca repository. If you use SQLite, the database has to be on a local hard drive on the machine where you plan to install Tosca Server.

    • If you use Notification Service, prepare the data transfer database.

    • If you use File Service, prepare the metadata database. This is only necessary if you want to store the metadata in your own database instead of the default database.

  2. Install Tosca on the machine where you plan to install Tosca Server. It's important to install Tosca first, as some Tosca Administration Console services need the client during setup.

  3. Install Tosca Server.

  4. Configure the services in the Tricentis Service Configuration.

  5. Open the Tosca Administration Console and add a new project.

  6. Edit the project, if necessary. For example, to activate Notification Service.

  7. Finish your various setups. For detailed setup and configuration instructions for each feature, check out the respective setup topics: Tricentis User Administration, Tricentis File Service, Tricentis Notification Service, qTest integration, SAP Solution Manager integration, pre-execution approval, or Tosca Dashboards.

  8. Finish the Tricentis User Administration workflow to create and organize users, so you can give them access to the project.

  9. Create Tricentis Server Repository workspaces.

What's next

The setup is complete. Now is a good time to distribute the workload going forward. Create additional admin users, so you're not the only one with access to the console.