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 Tosca Server features that significantly reduce time, work, and headache as your testing efforts scale. So, even if you wouldn't consider the console—or its included feature, Tricentis User Administration—by itself, we recommend that you reconsider.

Depending on whether you want to use authorization or authentication, you need to use the console in its entirety or not:

For authorization, you need to use the console in its entirety: create a project in the console, create users in Tricentis User Administration, organize them into groups, and assign these groups to projects. Plus, all workspaces must be Tricentis Server Repository workspaces.
For authentication, you only need to use part of the console: it's enough to have users in Tricentis User Administration. You don't need projects, user groups, or assigned groups. Plus, all workspaces must be local database or SQLite workspaces.

Basic 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 Tosca Server or Tosca Server features install guide.

To set up your basic infrastructure, follow these steps:

Prepare your database(s):
- Prepare the database for your common 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 and you don't want to use the default database, prepare your own data transfer database.
- If you use File Service and you don't want to use the default database, prepare your own metadata database.
Prepare the certificate you need for HTTPS setups.
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.
Install Tosca Server.
Configure the services in the Tricentis Service Configuration. Make sure you configure your services for HTTPS.
Open the Tosca Administration Console and add a new project.
Edit the project, if necessary. For example, to activate Notification Service.
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.
Finish the Tricentis User Administration workflow to create and organize users, so you can give them access to the project.
Ask testers to create their 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.