Looking inside the Web Intelligence Servers with Webi Admin Tool

It’s not supported, but that shouldn’t stop every BI4 Administrator from benefiting from the wonderful insight it can provide. Too often customers feel they don’t understand what the Web Intelligence server is doing; some see it as a bit of a black box. No more. The webiadmintool is a sophisticated bit of kit and worth spending a good few hours to understand how it can help you.

Here’s a summary:

1. The Profiling Dashboard will break down a single action, such as ‘opening a document’, into a large number of methods and for each its duration. Around 15 methods are shown for opening a document. This can help you identify which individual method is problematic: CMS communication, document cache, or generation of charts etc.
2. The Service LifeCycle Information shows which ‘objects’ have been left in memory and yet to be cleaned up, potentially highlighting a memory issue.
3. The Adaptive Processing Server Relationship shows, by user and document, which Web Intelligence server is using which other dependent service, like the Visualisation engine (for charts) or DSL Bridge (for the new Dimensional Semantic Layer). This means you can see inside the cluster to which user is consuming which bits of your cluster. This could be helpful to resolving a performance issue.
4. The plugins perspective allows you to “Remove a session” or “Remove all sessions using a particular document” or “Remove all session used a particular user id” should you wish to eliminate processing that is consuming too many resources.
5. The Profiling Perspective and Analysis enables you to compare two workflows with each other at a very detailed level. For example, you can compare the workflow of one user opening and interacting with a document, with the workflow for a different user. This might be helpful to isolate a performance issue, when one user ID performs slower than another.
6. The monitoring perspective enables you to visually see load (sessions, users, documents, memory usage) over time in a graph. This is ideal to validate a load test; or help you identity characteristics on the usage of your server.
7. The scheduling perspective shows you the internal tasks performed by the server, for self-maintenance and clean-up.
8. The Failover/Recovery status will help you identify the server name, user id, or document name that is frequently failing and causing a recovery to occur. Thus allowing you to take remedial steps

I’ve written a detailed wiki on the tool which I hope provides enough information for how to use the tool and the benefits for using it.

Please visit and bookmark the wiki: http://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/x/e5hxFw

Your feedback is, as always, most welcome. Please comment here or contact me on Twitter.

Matthew Shaw

(Twitter: @MattShaw_on_BI)