Functionality needed by an OBIEE System Administrator

If you are administering an OBIEE system, there are certain actions you need to take to keep your system healthy.  These actions include:

• System shut down and start up
• Capacity and availability management
• Issue resolution
• Securing the BI system
• Customizing a deployment
• Monitoring the system's performance

 These can all be done from within Enterprise Manager and are discussed in the following six sections.

1. Overview Tab

   After logging into Enterprise Manager, click on Farm_bifoundation_domain, then open Business Intelligence and click on coreapplication.  This will display the Overview tab.
   
   
   
   This lets you see which system components are running and which are down and also allows you to stop and start the system.  There are summary details on diagnostics and capacity management.  More detailed information on these is available form other tabs.

2. Capacity Management

   There are four sub-tabs to the Capacity Management tab.  From these you can see detailed metrics, check the system performance, scale the system and check its avaialbility.
   

   1. Metrics sub-tab

      This provdes the most used metrics for management and troubleshooting.  The metrics are sub-divided into responsiveness, load and errors.
      
      
      

   2. Performance sub-tab

      This is a single page for common tuning options.  Here you can turn cache on and off, allow on-line updates to the repository, set the user session expiry time and control the number of rows displayed in a table, downloaded to Excel or displayed in a page in an e-mail.
      
      
      

   3. Scalability sub-tab

      This allows page allows you to add more hosts or add more servers to a host ia horizontal and vertical scaling.
      With a horizontal scale out, you add more hosts.
      With a vertical scale out you add more servers to a host.
      
      
      For more information on scaling, see the following notes:
      
      

   4. Availability sub-tab

      On this page you can see which components are up (Status column shows a green arrow) or down (Status column shows a red arrow).  The host IP address and Oracle instance name are also given.  You can choose to stop, start or re-start either selected components or all components.
      
      Below this is a section on high availability.  It gives you guidance on the actions to take to assure high availablility.
      
      
      

3. Diagnostics and Logging

   The Diagnostics tab provides a single place from which to access all the components' log files. You can also the maximum size of a log file and its maximum age as well as specifying the level of detail and severity or error or warning logged.
   
   
   
   There is a link at the bottom of the screen to go to the Log Viewer.This allows you to search the log files for different message types (e.g. incident error), particular words or phrases, over a specified date range. This allows you to slice and dice the log files. For a given error in a component's log file, you can click on the ECID number and be able to see related errors in other component log files. This enables cross-component troubleshooting.
   
   
   
   

4. Security

   This screen simply allows you to enable or disable SSO and specify the SSO provider.
   
   

5. Deployment

   1. Presentation sub-tab

      This allows you to control how dashboards look and to control the auto-preview function for pivot tables.
      
       

   2. Repository sub-tab

      You can configure the name, data source name and password for your repository.  You can also upload a new repostory to the OBIEE instance.
      You can load the repository or presentation catalgo from a shared location.
      
       

   3. Scheduler sub-tab

      This tab allows you to configure the connection settings for the database where the scheduler information for BI Agents is stored.
      
      

   4. Marketing Server and Mail sub-tabs

      These two pages allow you to specify the configuration information for the marketing and mail servers.
      
      
      
      
      
      
      

6. Performance Monitoring

   At the top of the page is a drop down menu entitled Business Intelligence Instance.  Click on that and from the resulting menu, select the Monitor/Performance item.  This page allows you real-time monitoring of every aspect of the system .  this includes the WebLogic server as well as the BI Server and Presentation Server.