Is there any way to track what reports are actively running on BOE?

[Former Member]

Good Afternoon.

I am looking for a way to track the names of what reports are currently being run on Business Objects. We are on Business Objects Enterprise XI R2 SP3 and from what Iu2019m aware, the servers can show the administrators how many connections and how many jobs are running, and the auditing command can track when a report has completed/failed (from what I understand), but nothing really tells us what reports are actively being run.

The purpose of this is to measure impact for an emergency restart of the server, track down reports that are taking up system resources, and debugging issues involved with the SDK.

Background: We have several reports hosted on Business Objects, both Crystal Reports and Web Intelligence. These reports go to different universes and databases and use several different accounts depending on the project (no central generic accounts to the databases). Sometimes when people are running several large reports (some being upwards of 1 million rows) the users will open one, leave it to run and go to open several others, killing our session limit and resources on the server. In addition, there have been times in development that restarts have been required but there was no way to tell what reports were running, just the number of them, and in several different spots (RAS, Page server, etc.).

Wish list (If my first priority is answered, Iu2019m also looking for the following):

- One to one associations of what reports are being run by what users.

- A centralized location to see what reports are being run by users opening them and what reports are being run by users scheduling them.

- The ability to u201Ckillu201D a report that is taking too long to run by a user.

- Possibly an interactive dashboard showing the number of active reports verses the serveru2019s limit, what reports are set in queue, etc.

- The u201Cstageu201D a report is running in, so if someone is running a report but its stuck at the prompt for a variable stage, querying data from the database, getting data back from the database, producing and processing the data to the screen, etc.

If Iu2019ve missed something in the Business Objects tools or if someone knows of a way to extract this type of data from the Business Objects server (3rd party tool or custom fix) I would appreciate the assistance. Thank you for your time.

[former_member109387 · Accepted solution]

Some answers, anyway

- Launch the CMC admin launchpad, and select the Instance Manager. This allows you to view All Statuses, Success, Failed, Pending, Running, Recurring, and Paused either by specific users, or all users (% is the wildcard).

- View on demand vs scheduled views - no real time viewing really. Auditing will tell you actions by report if you like.

- The Instance Manager has a checkbox and "Delete" button.

- No such dashboard exists.

- This level of information is not available.

Limiting runaway queries is always a concern. Use the Universe connection controls and the WebI/Deski connection timeouts to accomplish this.

Perhaps others might have suggestions for custom reporting solutions.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thank you, this helps me a little but not as much as I was hoping.

Auditing is one thing we're looking into, but it seems not to log anything until the job completes. If a report is stuck endlessly active or if we need a realtime refresh, I'm afraid its going to be too slow to be of any use.

The Instance Manager is useful, but its only tracking the scheduled side. The sorting and ability to parse the data (like say track only failed reports for the last week) is weak. If any know how this information is extracted it would help answer some questions.

In my case, runaway queries aren't the issue, I'm more concerned with the connections Business Objects has open. Cutting these off is the root of the issue, cutting off the scheduled report solves part of that, but it doesn't solve the issue of people opening the report through infoview or users with dynamic prompts open. I believe that BOE stores it somewhere, since the servers seem to store metrics of how many connections and how many users are on, but it amazes me that no one (SAP included) has found a way or tried to access it.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

We have been struggling with exactly the same issue. I have talked with BO support (2nd level) about this and the response I got was that there is no admin features that would allow us to track reports users are currently viewing/refreshing in InfoView. We are running Enterprise XI 3.0 in a cluster environment and working on upgrading to 3.1 and I have not seen any features in either of these releases that provide this type of monitoring.

Seems like a big miss to me in regards to admin features. Hopefully BO will recognize this and address it in a future release.

-George

[former_member109387 · Accepted solution]

Well, it's a matter of perspective. I understand how some customers would desire this capability, but perhaps this has not been high on the priority list when considering all feature requests from all customers.

The current Enterprise administration is fully configurable to avoid runaway queries and unused connections remaining open for extended periods of time. I know this was not directly the question, but if your users are running on demand reports that return 1 million rows, or are hitting timeouts on their queries, if you are having issues with the number of open connections to your database, I could make an argument that this is indeed an issue on your deployment. These are things that could be effectively controlled by connection, universe, session, and server configuration. Also to consider is proper sizing of the environment to handle the requests generated on demand and scheduled.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

I see configuration of our XI systems and ability to monitor the runtime environment as two different features.Regardless of whether we feel we have our systems configured optimally there are frequently times when we want to know which user is running what report on demand and which server in the cluster is hosting that request. For example, there have been times when we had issues with a specific server in the cluster and would like to shutdown the server but not disrupting any user's activity. If we had the ability to identify which users were running reports on that server we could ask them to save their work before shutting down the server.

[former_member109387 · Accepted solution]

I fully understand what you are asking for, and agree the direct monitoring of activity does not exist in the manner you describe. I'm just trying to provide some alternatives for you within the product as it exists today.

When shutting down a server is required, you can look at the metrics for the service to view Open Connections/Active requests. Disable the service, and it will not accept any new job requests. They will either queue, or be passed to another available service. When the connections and active requests all drop, you can stop the service without interrupting anyone's work.

[Former Member]

Brian,

I don't know if you tried using the Query Builder.

The query below (or some modification of it) may be of some help.

SELECT
SI_SCHEDULEINFO, SI_NAME
FROM
CI_INFOOBJECTS
WHERE
SI_SCHEDULE_STATUS = 1

The SI_SCHEDULEINFO.SI_SUBMITTER property in the query result will give you the BOUSER value of the user that submitted the job.

SI_SCHEDULE_STATUS takes the following values:
0	The job is currently being processed by the job server.
1	The job completed successfully.
3	The job failed. Check error message.
8	The job is paused. 
9	The job has not started because dependencies are not satisfied (e.g. Events)

Best,

Srinivas

[Former Member]

Hi,

If you have your audit database configured, you can create your own Webi or Crystal reports against Activity Universe which comes with Enterpise install.

I have few Webi reports designed against Acitivity Universe which does all which you have in your wish list.

Megha

[Former Member]

Hello,

To the best of my knowledge, reports based on the Activity universe won't tell you what report are currently running. Even if the Activity universe does include this information, the audit reports will only currently running reports if these reports run longer than 5 minutes (If I remember correctly, the data is updated in the Audit db every 5 minutes).

Also, how do you determine which stage a currently running report is in? I didn't think this was captured.

Best,

Srinivas

[Former Member]

Instance Manager will tell you what reports are currently running and which user is currently running them. This is accessible from the Administration Launchpad.

As for your other requirements, you could try something like [Instance-Analyser|http://www.zoom-software.com/BI-Tools/Instance-Analyser.html]. There are others that I can't seem to remember.

[Former Member]

Oh, and I wll evaluate the instance Analyser, but I was hoping to come up with a no cost solution if possible. It does look like it simplifies reporting.