Introduction This is the first part of three detailed articles making up a mini-series about OBIEE monitoring. It demonstrates how to capture OBIEE performance information, and optionally graph it out and serve it through an auto-updating webpage. For some background on OBIEE’s Systems Management component, along with JMX and MBeans, see here and here. The following assumes you know your mbeans from coffee beans and jmx from a bmx. The metric collection is built around the jmxsh tool.

Those of you who read my blog regularly may have noticed I have a slight obsession with the OBIEE systems management capability which is exposed through JMX. Venkat has blogged this week about JMX in OBI11g, and it’s clearly a technology worth understanding properly. I’ve recently been tinkering with how to make use of it for monitoring purposes, most recently using JConsole and discussed here. What follows is an extension of this idea, cobbled together with a bit of shell scripting, awk, gnuplot, and sticky backed plastic.

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 ?

They say about travelling that it’s the journey and not the destination, and the same is true with this problem we hit during a deployment to Production. We were deploying a new OBIEE 10g implementation, with authentication provided by Microsoft Active Directory (AD) through the LDAP functionality in OBIEE. As a side note, it’s a rather nice way to do authentication, although maybe I’m biased coming from our previous implementation which used EBS integrated authentication and was a bugger to set up and work with.

Folk from Yorkshire are tight, so the stereotype goes. So here’s a cheap-ass way to monitor OBIEE 10g using nothing but the OBIEE built-in systemsmanagement component, the jmx agent, and jconsole (which is part of the standard Java distribution): From here you can also export to CSV the various counters, and then store history, plot it out with gnuplot or Excel, etc. If anyone’s interested let me know and I’ll document a bit more about how I did this, but it’s basically building on previous work I’ve documented around jmx and OBIEE.

I’ve been involved with some performance work around an ODI DWH load batch. The batch comprises well over 1000 tasks in ODI, and whilst the Operator console is not a bad interface, it’s not very easy to spot the areas consuming the most runtime. Here’s a set of SQL statements to run against the ODI work repository tables to help you methodically find the steps of most interest for tuning efforts.

I heard this on Thinking Allowed and thought how applicable it was to the attitudes that you can sometimes encounter in both systems development, and the support of production systems: “Each uneventful day that passes reinforces a steadily growing false sense of confidence that everything is all right – that I, we, my group must be OK because the way we did things today resulted in no adverse consequences.” by Scott Snook (Senior Lecturer in the Organizational Behavior unit at Harvard Business School )

Jeff McQuigg has posted two presentations that he gave at Openworld 2010 on his website here: http://greatobi.wordpress.com/2010/10/26/oow-presos/ They’re full of real content and well worth a read. There’s excellent levels of detail and plenty to think about if you’re involved in OBI or DW development projects.

Continuing in the beard-scratching theme of Unix related posts (previously - awk), here’s a way to graph out the I/O profile of your Oracle database via the Oracle metrics in gv$sysstat, and gnuplot. This is only the system I/O as observed by Oracle, so for belts & braces (or to placate a cynical sysadmin ;-)) you may want to cross-reference it with something like sar. First, a pretty picture of what you can get:

More of a unix thing than DW/BI this post, but I have a beard so am semi-qualified…. The requirement was to improve the performance of some ODI processing that as part of its work was taking one huge input file, and splitting it into chunks based on content in the file. To add some (minor) spice the file was fixed width with no deliminators, so the easy awk answers that I found on google weren’t applicable.