UPDATED: See a HOWTO for OBIEE and LoadRunner here: /2009/10/01/performance-testing-obiee-using-hp-performance-center-a.k.a.-loadrunner/ This is following on from my first post about OBIEE and LoadRunner, in which I failed dismally to get a simple session replaying. In a nutshell where I’d got to was using the “Web (Click and Script)” function which worked fine for logging in but when running a report resulted in an error on the rendered page. Digging around showed the error was from the javascript of the OBIEE front end.

As well as tinkering with the sawserver (Presentation Services) logging level and format, we can specific which bits of the log we’re interested in. This is useful for two reasons: We can enable detailed logging for a specific area, without impacting performance as much as detailed logging throughout would cause By only logging in detail the area of interest we can more easily read the log output and not have to wade through pages of irrelevant information Chapter 9 (“Using the Oracle BI Presentation Services Logging Facility”) of the Presentation Services Administration Guide details the log configuration.

I posted a while ago about the sawserver (Presentation Services) log configuration file. Today I’m doing some work digging around why sawserver’s throwing an error and so increased the log detail. This parameter is really helpful to use: fmtName=“short” Consider in these two screenshots, the first is with the default log format and shows about six entries. The second is short log format and is about ten times as much data.

Here’s a set of scripts that I use on our servers as a quick way to check if the various BI components are up and running. Because we split the stack across servers, there are different scripts called in combination. On our dev boxes we have everything and so the script calls all three sub-scripts, whereas on Production each server will run one of: BI Server Presentation Server & OAS Informatica & DAC The scripts source another script called process_check.

If, for some reason, you need to check what web application server is in use for Presentation Services (as this chap needed to), you can use an add-in for FireFox called HttpFox to inspect the HTTP headers. 1. Install HttpFox (and obviously Firefox if you don’t have it already!) 2. Open the HttpFox window (Tools -> HttpFox -> Toggle HttpFox) 3. Click the Start button in the HttpFox window 4. Navigate to your OBIEE home page

Our main servers are Unix and I’m as happy as a pig in muck at the command line, so when I’m working on Windows (where I’ve got a test OBIEE install) I like to stick with the CLI where possible. PSService is one of those tools that I instinctively reach for without realising it. Combined with Launchy, it’s even better. Simply put, you can control windows services from the command line.

By a strange co-incidence after following this thread on OTN forums about a BI crash and struggling to understand the actual problem, I think I’ve encountered it myself! I’ve got a test install of OBIEE running on my Windows XP laptop, and whilst building a report in Answers got this: ](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_RCx_EVJpczQ/SmiDrEorbbI/AAAAAAAAGcg/OPGwTLXXg8k/s1600/crash1.png)[ was: szAppName : sawserver.exe szAppVer : 10.1.3.4 szModName : kernel32.dll szModVer : 5.1.2600.3119 offset : 000097a3 Going to the sawserver log at c:\OracleBIData\web\log\sawlog0.

The configuration of how Presentation Services (sawserver) does its logging is in the file web/config/logconfig.xml (same directory as instanceconfig.xml). It’s all nice and XML’d: Logging Detail Change the numerical values in the FilterRecord entries to alter the detail level of the logging. Lower means less detail, higher means more. Be aware that your log files can grow very rapidly if you set the logging too high, and unless you’re troubleshooting then leave them at the defaults.

A few points to add to my previous posting on JConsole: As well as performance data, you have access to configuration data. Be aware that it is read-write! So whilst it might be a nice alternative to digging around for your instanceconfig.xml etc, you should be careful If you have your BI Server and Presentation Services deployed on separate servers then you will only get MBeans for the relevant service: If you want to view the values of the BI Server MBeans and your Presentation Services server is not on the same box then you have to use JConsole/JMX, as Performance Monitor will not have access to the values: ](http://2.

As a kid I loved the idea of lego where you can disassemble and reassemble something from the ground up. As soon as I got my hands on a computer it was the same. You can have your Acorn Archimedes with its games, where do I find the sprites and sound files behind it? Likewise Microsoft Word, let me at the VBA underneath to hack it around and see what else it can do.