Guidelines on OTBI/BIP Usage

Question

Hi,

We have a large number of OTBI analysis and BIP reports being executed on an hourly basis. We also repeatedly have errors on timeouts related to BIP presentation services being unavailable. I would like to enquire as to what are the guidelines around how OTBI/BIP has been designed and what sort of volumes of concurrent reporting jobs is it sized to handle.

What customer guidelines can be provided so that we can do an analysis if we are exceeding the Oracle guidelines.

Secondly, is there an sizing exercise we can do just pertaining to OTBI/BIP to understand if our production instance is sized correctly to handle the number of reporting requests there are.

Nathan CCC · Answer

Hi, For your second question regards sizing. So the Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) (OBI) in OTBI is platform Oracle Business Intelligence (OBI) 12c (suite Enterprise Edition(EE)) (but since Standard Edition (SE) has not been sold since like 2008 you can if you like drop the EE from OBIEE). OBI is a suite of products; dashboards (blue), analysis (blue), publisher reports and data models (yellow) (this is the business intelligence publisher BIP product inside suite of products OBI), actions and agents (intelligence robots) (green) and some other products (red, purple, teal) (the colours are the colurs of the objects you create in the catalog). The T in OTBI is the pre-built package of content that oracle have built for you using the OBI platform of analytics and reports in the catalog and the subject areas in the metadata repository database (RPD) in the bi server on the application server in the middleware.

Because OTBI is hosted as SaaS lots of features is limited and locked down restricted. That said here is a guide I have used for capacity planning in the past when implementing analysis and reports in OBI as a stand alone platform. It will be difficult to take any actions since you have no administrator privileges to update configuration files on the application and database servers etc. But I guess you can ask Oracle to do so.

The sheet it gives you is a function with input about number of users and concurrent users with how many simple, medium, complex queries they submit. From this benchmark you get an output with an estimate of what hardware sizing might be needed to support such a workload.

OBIEE 11g | 12c: Architectural Deployment Capacity Planning Guide (Doc ID 1323646.1)

NOTE:2106183.1 - Best Practices Guide for Infrastructure Tuning Oracle® Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 12c (OBIEE)

Nathan CCC · Answer

Hi,

Both analysis (blue) and reports (yellow) are in OTBI.

The data models in your reports in OTBI may be from 4 data sources; 3 application pillar databases CRM, HCM, FSCM and 4 Oracle BI EE (a data set from an analysis or the logical sql with in either case a query from subject areas in the metadata repository database (rpd)). A report data model in OTBI may have more than one data set so might be in both A and B below. An analysis (blue) is A.

For A) Analysis in OTBI and the sub set of Reports in OTBI with data models with data sets that query subject areas in the metadata repository database (RPD) -

you can view the session logs on page ../analytics/saw.dll?Sessions which is the audit data stored in subject areas "OTBI Usage Real Time" and "OTBI Performance Real Time" with the start and end times of each logical/physical query from tables S_NQ_ACCT, S_NQ_DB_ACCT. So you can do some analysis on those date ranges to see what overlaps to get a metric of cuncurrency. Also go to the performance monitoring page to view some metrics /analytics/saw.dll?perfmon like presentation server (PS) "Peak Sessions" "The peak number of concurrent sessions".

For B) The sub set of Reports in OTBI with data models with datasets that query directly the application tables and views in CRM, HCM, FSCM

You have by default got audit turned on by default so you can query the audit tables to get information about the report executions in AuditViewDB. Write your own queries or upload the reports from my oracle support How To Configure And Use Audit In BI Publisher in OTBI For Fusion SaaS Cloud Customers? (Doc ID 2059102.1) For example, Concurrency Report showing Hourly Concurrency