Utility for monitoring Webi/APS activity in real-time
Purpose of document:
This utility is a very useful utility for real-time Webi-APS usage and relationship tracking.
This utility provides an overview of current connections between WIReportServer and APS processes on each machine, also allowing you to further analyze what user is actually running the report and has the open session with each server.
Where this utility is available:
it is available on each of the BI 4.0 servers. From the G:\Program Files (x86)\SAP BusinessObjects\SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 4.0\java\apps\WebiAdminTool directory
Prerequisite:
you need to have a 64-bit java/bin directory in the system PATH variable as a per-requisite.
How to execute:
a file named GenericContainer_AdminTool exists, which you can execute via DOS using the java –jar command.
To run the program, execute the following. Again, just make sure a 64-bit java.exe is accessible in the system PATH variable. A quick java –version command from DOS will verify whether a java executable is available
Please find the below screen.
You’ll have to log in with credentials of a user that is an administrator in the environment to use it:
You’ll first be presented with an initial overview of the Webi processing servers:
From here, you can access the relationship graph, as well as current Webi session metrics that allow you to track some important metrics in real-time, by clicking on the different buttons on the left-hand side of the screen:
It will display Total Session count, Swapped Session Count, Cache Size,Virtual Memory Size,Current Client calls, Active session count, Logged Usage count, CPU Usage of Webi processing servers.
fail over/recovery Server information:
In the Next screen, where you will be able to find the present calls between Webi processing server and APS.
we can find which service is handling which request in real-time.
Note:
I’ve included some screenshots around the primary uses of the tool. Please try this utility and let us know if you have any questions/problems in using it. One word of caution, try not to run too many instances of this program on the same machine, as each instance of the program has around a .5 to 1GB RAM footprint, so can quickly spike up the memory on the machine it’s being run from if too many instances are running.
hope this document is useful.
Thanks ..
Only users with good understanding of BOE platform and Webi should attempt usage of this utility. SAP support should be contacted before making any changes using this utility.
Utility itself is not officialy documented and its usage is not officialy supported.
Hello
As IT responsible of BO BI 4.1 Plateform (14000) users, for me this kind of tool is very very useful.
My "dream" : to know who use "now/in real-time" BI4 platform and do what ? (which, toll, consult report, size of report/memory and cpu consumption, ...) It is "just" mandatory
This tool must be integrated in CMC. This is my wish, please SAP !
You know the "CMC product owner" ?
Regards
Bruno
Bruno, this would be fantastic.
Have you visited ideas.sap.com?
Looks like it is usefull for APS - WEBI monitoring.
This tool provides good insight into what is happening on webi processing servers. We have been using it since mid 2012 and although it can occassionally crash, eg. during removal of user sessions, we did not encounter any serious problems with it.
In the most common scenario we analyse which reports are being executed on which webi servers. In the Activities Perspective further details can be gathered, which can be meaningful in problem analysis. For example what method is currently being processed (eg. processDPCommands or getPages). Plus it gives guick access to logs for specific webi processing server, that is more convenient for quick checks that having to launch GLF Viewer. The charts are great for having a quick overview, especially that you can set an time interval refresh. There are many other functionalities which we still did not have a chance to explore yet.
This is a tool that might come very handy for each admin.
I have just started using this tool and find it extremely helpful in understanding what is going on within the WebI processes. I'm wondering if there is a user guide or case study that would jumpstart my ability to use the different tabs.
Thanks
Utility is not officially documented and its usage is not officially supported.
Does it have to be officially supported for someone to write an scn blog on it? Is there any place we can go to in order to suggest tool enhancements?
I find this tool extremely useful to monitor the webi sessions too, but the constant refreshing and clicking through to see what job is on what server, etc. gets tiresome and is only going to get worse for me as we get more users on the system. The filter doesn't actually seem to filter, so I'm not even sure if it is a filter... but it would be great if there was a filter such that you could show only reports for a particular user, or just those running on a server or two, etc. or even something that displays how long that session has been connected (would help with time out issues!).
Honestly, I am in this tool every day, several times a day, checking on our environment and this is one of my first sources of data when a user reports an error too. I don't understand why it isn't officially documented or supported quite frankly.
-missy
Missy,
you can write a blog on SCN about this tool if you wish. Not supported/documented means that officially SAP does not provide anything about this tool.
If you want to suggest enhancements, you can do so in Idea Place: SAP: Enterprise Home
Denis,
Thanks for the info. I am going to pass on writing a blog on it for now 🙂 I'm not that qualified... still learning! I just find this tool very helpful and I'm sure I only understand a small percentage so far of what it can tell me - I mean I mostly only use the Relationships View and the Server Instances view to begin with! And I'm just using it to view... haven't made changes, etc. from it.
I didn't think about suggesting enhancements on the Idea Place... I guess I thought that was really only for supported tools. I'll give that a whirl....
-missy
I am not looking for "Official" documentation. I am hoping someone with more experience in the tool than I can share some insights (or even some unofficial documentation)
I also came across this other post which I had found helpful for navigating other parts of the tool too:
http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-47300
just wanted to pass that along in case you hadn't see it... If that link doesn't work for some reason, just search for "Steps to use GenericContainer_Admintool' and it should come up.
it doesn't have a lot of additional detail, but it shows the Server Instances View to view activities real time, which has been helpful, too.
-missy
Wow
Brilliant post by JRK. Brings visibility system internals in seconds.
Keep it up bro.
🙂
Hi All ,
Is there any way we enable monitoring of history data via this by enabling the history.
Is there way to enable history in this tool.
Regards ,
Abhinav
Abhinav,
What do you mean by 'enable history'? Once you open each server instance, you can change your perspective to 'Activities Perspective' and then off to the right of the screen is an option for Activities History. You can change the size of history. I am not sure if this means number of activities captured or what, but my guess is that's what it does.
Then, on this same view, you can switch tabs from Current Activities to Activities History and refresh it to show all the activities captured. I find this helpful, especially for performance testing when we are comparing the length of time it took to perform some action. I also find it helpful for when I get a call that asks if something completed (like an export to excel that may or may not have come back to the screen) because I can refresh the history and seek it out. It's not the most friendly interface, but it gets the job done.
It would be nice if just this data was captured in a log somewhere too, that would be more easily searched/reviewed. I don't think that happens though.
Does any of that help?
Thanks,
missy
Thank Missy.
I thought there is some way we can store history data in this tool. I was wrong.
This is real time monitoring tool.
Thanks for this .
Regards ,
Abhinav
We will start using this. For people who waiting official doc, for my concern, I like better blog then official doc from SAP 🙂
Hello all,
I've created probably the most thorough documentation for the webiadmintool to-date.
Please see WebiAdminTool - Business Intelligence (BusinessObjects) - SCN Wiki
Comments are welcome
Regards
Matthew
Hello,
After some time of using the tool I noticed that the most useful perspectives for me are sessions and activities. First one for checking on which Webi processing server user opened specific report and the second to identify which report is being currently processed on Webi Processing Server. The main pain here is that when having a clustered environment with 10 Webi servers per node (20 server instances in total), in order to find the specific user session one has to open each Server Instance Manager, switch to proper perspective and navigate through sessions - this is quite a lot of clicking 🙂 What I am missing here, is some general view showing for example all the session or all activities in one table. Luckily one can use the GenericContainer_AdminTool sdk to implement such thing in a simple Java app, but still it would be something "nice to have" in standard solution.
Regards
Andrzej