How SAP Business Objects gave our team a sleepless night

Hi All,

I am no expert in Business Objects but encountered an issue on Monday that made me learn a lot. In this short blog post i will cover the error, analysis and resolution for the error we got on Monday Morning and got resolved by Tuesday evening only.

Our BO version 4.1 SP4 Update 4

Error

The error began with an email from our customer that the BO isn’t working. We have been facing issues with tomcat lately so we are used to getting these kind of calls. We took it as any other day and started looking at the logs for tomcat crash.

By the way if anyone of you face issues like below in your BO environment, the fix is documented in SAP note  1906557 – Tomcat crash due to EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION in the zip.dll with Java_java_util_zip_ZipEntry_initFields

A file named hs_err_pidxxxxx contains

RE version: Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (6.0_65-b11) (build 6.1.058)

# Java VM: SAP Java Server VM (6.1.058 24.45-b11 Nov  3 2013 00:29:18 – 61_REL – optU – windows amd64 – 6 – bas2:205339 (mixed mode) compressed oops)

# Problematic frame:

# C  [zip.dll+0x4c9b]  Java_java_util_zip_ZipEntry_initFields+0x1f8b (sp=0x00000000390bf170) (pc=0x000007fefb524c9b)

Coming back to the Monday Error, there were no traces or this kind of file so we thought of restarting BO once as i have been getting alerts for high memory consumption. Post restart the customer could enter BO CMC and BI Launchpad but when refreshed one of the Webi Reports to fetch data from backend BW, we got an error as “Failed to Connect to the OLAP Source (Error: INF)” and the day began with a High priority ticket in my queue. Too much for a Monday morning 😥 😥

Analysis

Our analysis included a number of notes, SCN links, Wiki links and a very high ticket with SAP by Monday evening. The most important blog post was by Ted Ueda which helped me narrow down the issue.

End-to-End Trace and Identifying Root Cause for BI 4.x Web Intelligence

In the CMC — Under Authentication, we maintain a user to backend SAP BW. as soon as we refreshed the report thrice it was getting locked. The users could not login to BI Launchpad if this user was locked using SAP authentication.

Then the blog post mentioned above came to our rescue. With the step by step instructions to look for error in GLF files, I could see the error Name or Password is incorrect. We changed the password, put the password in BO but it did not help 🙁

Now we were quite dependent on SAP’s engineer as we had tried almost everything. Like trying create a new OLAP connection, check new Webi Report, etc, etc but to no avail. It looked more like a treasure hunt with clues and clues but no actual treasure 😡

Another interesting thing was the error when creating a new Webi report. As soon as we clicked on the the OLAP connection we were presented with the Error

java.util.concurrent.ExecutionException: com.businessobjects.sdk.core.server.CommunicationException$UnexpectedServerException: [[error.openSapBwBrowsingSessionFailed] 0] <<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ standalone=”yes”?><ConnectionString>

Resolution

I will call myself too tired to do a note search with error.openSapBwBrowsingSessionFailed as i found numerous SCN posts with similar failed connection to OLAP and no resolution. We have already wasted 1.5 days to resolve this and we were nowhere.

The SAP engineer who had a session with me helped find SAP note 2062091 – In the “Select a BEx query” window, when creating a Web Intelligence report based on BEx, the message “Error: openSapBwBrowsingSessionFailed” appears.

This particular note talks about

1. Log into BI Launchpad with the user that was added to the Administrator’s group.
2. Create a new Web Intelligence report in the Applet, selecting BEx as the data source, and selecting the OLAP connection on the left window.
3. After a few moments, the error “Error: openSapBwBrowsingSessionFailed” appears.

• Once this occurs, the SAP BW account for the Entitlement System becomes or may become locked in BW system, due to too many incorrect attempts.
• If the password for the SAP account that is entered in the Entitlement System tab within the CMC / Authentication SAP  section is updated to not contain a special character, the problem does not appear for some environments.

The same was happening with us and the reason was too simple to be true. But as soon as we setup a password without Special characters it was all back to normal. So if you are also getting an issue like this. Try above SAP note and see if it helps.

Such a simple issue gave me and my team a sleepless night but as they say — all is well that ends well 🙂 🙂

Hope you enjoyed reading the post and special thanks to Ted for helping others with such a nice blog and the SAP Engineer who helped us resolve this issue.

Regards

Aditya Khorana