The Mystery of the Missing Monitoring Metrics

On a melancholy Monday morning, I meandered onto my Monitoring application in SAP BI4. Much to my mortification, my monitoring metrics were missing! Mon Dieu! Alright, that’s about all of the alliteration I can stand for one blog post. But seriously, this happened, and I’m going to share with you how to fix it. I […]

SAP BusinessObjects BI 4 Log Analysis – Useful Commands

Making log analysis easier with Unix commands A couple of weeks ago, I presented a webinar on the topic of analyzing logs for SAP BusinessObjects BI4. The objective for that webinar was to share my opinion of the skills and framework required for being successful at troubleshooting the BI platform with the assistance of logs. […]

Demolition Derby, Part 1: Derby, maybe?

If you’ve been following the developments in the BI4 world over the last year, then you’ve undoubtedly noticed the long-awaited and much needed addition of the Monitoring engine. For years I used to jibe SAP about how BOBJ was really designed as a stand-alone, small use application. BI4 is the first major step towards a truly “enterprise” application. The monitoring engine is some good evidence of this. Where system administrators used to be blind to internal operations of BI platform, we now have unprecedented visibility.

Ghosts in the Database

It is a little early in the year for ghost stories, but this chilling tale can’t quite wait for the leaves to change and the apple cider to harden. Let me spin my haunting tale. Come with me if you dare.

It was a dark and stormy night. Storm clouds billowed in the distance in the light of the full moon, punctuated by the occasional flash of lightning, foreshadowing the torrential storm to come.The shiny new BI4 system hummed quietly along after the day’s successful upgrade of content from XI 3.1. Then, suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, the DBA’s paged me, your humble on-call BOE Administrator, saying the database is going crazy with queries. The source of all of the queries is the BI4 system. But how can that be? The system is brand new. Nobody is logged in yet. There are no scheduled jobs yet.

A Pound of Cure

Experience is the hardest teacher. And the cruelest.
I had a blog worthy experience the other night while patching a BI4 production system.

Back in the good old XIr2 days, we used to have to take a total outage to apply a server patch to BusinessObjects Enterprise. On that version, the patcher needed the services to be down in order to update them, then you would start them back up manually once you were finished. In a cluster it was the same.

What is the Remote Support Component?

If you’ve been an administrator of Business Objects Enterprise for a while like we have, then there are a few big questions you regularly get asked and until now have had no good answers for.

What’s going on inside of Business Objects when I run a report? Which step in the process is taking so long?

How do I know when something bad is lurking in there?