Presentation Services can provide some very detailed logs, useful for troubleshooting, performance tracing, and general poking around. See here for details.

There’s no bi-init.sh in 12c, so need to set up the LD_LIBRARY_PATH ourselves:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/app/oracle/biee/bi/bifoundation/web/bin/:/app/oracle/biee/bi/lib/:/app/oracle/biee/lib/:/app/oracle/biee/bi/bifoundation/odbc/lib/

Run sawserver with flag to list all log sources

/app/oracle/biee/bi/bifoundation/web/bin/sawserver -logsources > saw_logsources_12.2.1.txt

Full list: https://gist.github.com/rmoff/e3be9009da6130839c71181cb58509a0

Hot on the heels of one problem, another has just reared its head.

Users started reporting an error with reports that included charts: [sourcecode] Chart server does not appear to be responding in a timely fashion. It may be under heavy load or unavailable. [/sourcecode]

Set up is a OBIEE 10.1.3.4.1 two-server deployment with BI/PS/Javahost clustered and loadbalanced throughout.

Diagnostics

Javahost was running, and listening, on both servers: [sourcecode] $ps -ef|grep javahost obieeadm 14076 1 0 Nov 25 ? 9:23 /app/oracle/product/OracleAS_1/jdk/bin/IA64N/java -server -classpath /app/oracle/product/obiee/web/javahost/lib/core/sautils.ja $netstat -a|grep 9810|grep LISTEN tcp 0 0 *.9810 *.* LISTEN [/sourcecode]

@alexgorbachev tweeted me recently after picking up my presentation on Performance Testing and OBIEE.

His question got me thinking, and as ever the answer “It Depends” is appropriate here :-)

Why is the measurement being done?

Without knowing the context of the work Alex is doing, how to measure depends on whether the measurement needs to be of: -

1. The actual response times that the users are getting, or
2. The response times that the system is currently capable of delivering

This may sound like splitting hairs or beard-scratching irrelevance, but it’s not. If the aim of the exercise is to be able to make a statement along the lines of:

We hit a very interesting problem in our Production environment recently. We’d made no changes for a long time to the configuration, but all of a sudden users were on the phone complaining. They could login to BI from EBS but after logging in the next link they clicked took them to the OBIEE “You are not logged in” screen.

Our users login to EBS R12 and then using EBS authentication log in to OBIEE (10.1.3.4). Our OBIEE is deployed on OAS, load balanced across two servers by an F5 BIG-IP hardware load balancer.

Short but sweet this one - a way of troubleshooting connectivity problems between analytics (the Presentation Services Plug-in, either j2ee servlet or ISAPI, a.k.a. SAWBridge) and sawserver (Presentation Services).

For a recap on the services & flow please see the first few paragraphs of this post.

Problems in connectivity between analytics and sawserver normally manifest themselves through this error message:

500 Internal Server Error Servlet error: An exception occurred. The current application deployment descriptors do not allow for including it in this response. Please consult the application log for details.

Whilst installing OBIA 7.9.6.1 I hit this problem when firing up Presentation Services (sawserver):

Error loading security privilege /system/privs/catalog/ChangePermissionsPrivilege.

A quick search on the forums threw up two posts suggesting a corrupted WebCat.

Since I’d got this webcat fresh out of the box I was puzzled how it could be corrupted.

I did a bit more tinkering (including nosying around in the sawserver log), before realising it was indeed corrupt, and that I was indeed a muppet.

Introduction

Whilst the BI Cluster Controller takes care nicely of clustering and failover for BI Server (nqsserver), we have to do more to ensure further resilience of the stack.

A diagram I come back to again and again when working out configuration or connectivity problems is the one on P16 of the Deployment Guide. With this you can work out most issues for yourself through simple reasoning. Print it out, pin it to your wall, and read it!

Production cluster is 2x BI Server and 2x Presentation Services, with a BIG-IP F5 load balancer on the front.

Symptoms

Users started reporting slow login times to BI. Our monitoring tool (Openview) reported that “BIServer01 may be down. Failed to contact it using ping.”. BIServer01 cannot be reached by ping or ssh from Windows network.

Diagnostics

nqsserver and nqsclustercontroller on BIServer01 was logging these repeated errors:

[nQSError: 12002] Socket communication error at call=send: (Number=9) Bad file number

Introduction

In this article I plan to get samplesales and paint repositories hosted on a single server, using one BI Server instance and two Presentation Services instances. This is on both Unix (OEL 4) and Windows, and both OC4J (OBIEE’s “basic installation” option) and OAS (“Advanced Installation”).

Both samplesales and paint are shipped with 10.1.3.4 of OBIEE, you’ll find them in $OracleBI/OracleBI/server/Sample. This article assumes you’ve got the RPD of each into $OracleBI/OracleBI/server/Repository and unpacked the web cats for each into $OracleBIdata/web/catalog. It also assumes that you know your way around the architecture of BI and are familiar with NQSConfig.ini and instanceconfig.xml - if neither of those files mean anything to you then you will find some background reading useful.

Introduction

In this article I plan to get sample and paint repositories hosted on a single server, using one BI Server instance and two Presentation Services instances. This is on both Unix (OEL 4) and Windows, and both OC4J (OBIEE’s “basic installation” option) and OAS (“Advanced Installation”).

Make sure you’ve read and followed part 1 - BI Server first.

Remember that multiple Presentation Services instances on a machine is UNSUPPORTED BY ORACLE!

UPDATED: See a HOWTO for OBIEE and LoadRunner here: /2009/10/01/performance-testing-obiee-using-hp-performance-center-a.k.a.-loadrunner/

This is following on from my first post about OBIEE and LoadRunner, in which I failed dismally to get a simple session replaying.

In a nutshell where I’d got to was using the “Web (Click and Script)” function which worked fine for logging in but when running a report resulted in an error on the rendered page. Digging around showed the error was from the javascript of the OBIEE front end.

As well as tinkering with the sawserver (Presentation Services) logging level and format, we can specific which bits of the log we’re interested in. This is useful for two reasons:

1. We can enable detailed logging for a specific area, without impacting performance as much as detailed logging throughout would cause
2. By only logging in detail the area of interest we can more easily read the log output and not have to wade through pages of irrelevant information

Chapter 9 (“Using the Oracle BI Presentation Services Logging Facility”) of the Presentation Services Administration Guide details the log configuration.

I posted a while ago about the sawserver (Presentation Services) log configuration file. Today I’m doing some work digging around why sawserver’s throwing an error and so increased the log detail. This parameter is really helpful to use:

fmtName=“short”

Consider in these two screenshots, the first is with the default log format and shows about six entries. The second is short log format and is about ten times as much data.

Here’s a set of scripts that I use on our servers as a quick way to check if the various BI components are up and running.

Because we split the stack across servers, there are different scripts called in combination. On our dev boxes we have everything and so the script calls all three sub-scripts, whereas on Production each server will run one of:

1. BI Server
2. Presentation Server & OAS
3. Informatica & DAC

The scripts source another script called process_check.sh which I based on the common.sh script that comes with OBIEE.

If, for some reason, you need to check what web application server is in use for Presentation Services (as this chap needed to), you can use an add-in for FireFox called HttpFox to inspect the HTTP headers.

1. Install HttpFox (and obviously Firefox if you don’t have it already!)
2. Open the HttpFox window (Tools -> HttpFox -> Toggle HttpFox)
3. Click the Start button in the HttpFox window
4. Navigate to your OBIEE home page
5. Click the Stop button in the HttpFox window
6. Click on the first entry in the list, URL should be http://yourserver:7777/analytics/saw.dll?Dashboard
7. In the right-hand pane of the Headers tab you should see Server listed. In this instance, it’s Oracle-Application-Server-10g/10.1.3.1.0 Oracle-HTTP-Server

Our main servers are Unix and I’m as happy as a pig in muck at the command line, so when I’m working on Windows (where I’ve got a test OBIEE install) I like to stick with the CLI where possible.

PSService is one of those tools that I instinctively reach for without realising it. Combined with Launchy, it’s even better.

Simply put, you can control windows services from the command line.

By a strange co-incidence after following this thread on OTN forums about a BI crash and struggling to understand the actual problem, I think I’ve encountered it myself!

I’ve got a test install of OBIEE running on my Windows XP laptop, and whilst building a report in Answers got this:

](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_RCx_EVJpczQ/SmiDrEorbbI/AAAAAAAAGcg/OPGwTLXXg8k/s1600/crash1.png)[ was:

szAppName : sawserver.exe szAppVer : 10.1.3.4 szModName : kernel32.dll szModVer : 5.1.2600.3119 offset : 000097a3

Going to the sawserver log at c:\OracleBIData\web\log\sawlog0.log disappointingly showed no error entries :(

The configuration of how Presentation Services (sawserver) does its logging is in the file web/config/logconfig.xml (same directory as instanceconfig.xml).

It’s all nice and XML’d:

Logging Detail
Change the numerical values in the FilterRecord entries to alter the detail level of the logging. Lower means less detail, higher means more.

Be aware that your log files can grow very rapidly if you set the logging too high, and unless you’re troubleshooting then leave them at the defaults.

A few points to add to my previous posting on JConsole:

• As well as performance data, you have access to configuration data. Be aware that it is read-write! So whilst it might be a nice alternative to digging around for your instanceconfig.xml etc, you should be careful
• If you have your BI Server and Presentation Services deployed on separate servers then you will only get MBeans for the relevant service:

As a kid I loved the idea of lego where you can disassemble and reassemble something from the ground up. As soon as I got my hands on a computer it was the same. You can have your Acorn Archimedes with its games, where do I find the sprites and sound files behind it? Likewise Microsoft Word, let me at the VBA underneath to hack it around and see what else it can do.