Preparing to install Report Engine

Before installing the TrueSight Operations Management Report Engine, ensure that your environment meets the installation requirements given here:

• Planning-the-TrueSight-Operations-Management-Report-Engine-deployment
• Performance-and-scalability-recommendations-for-the-Report-Engine

Complete the preinstallation tasks for the TrueSight Operations Management Report Engine

Ensure that you have:

• Installed and configured the Reporting database.
• Downloaded the product installation files.

Best practices for deploying TrueSight Operations Management Reporting

You can use the following best practices while performing various taks in TrueSight Operations Management Reporting.

General Best Practices

• All Report Engine components should be on the same network as TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server. 
• Clocks of all components should be in sync, especially the TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server (Source system) and the Report engine server. In sync does not limit the servers to be in the same time zone, however, the clocks of all servers should be set to the same time (not running fast or behind the other servers respective to their time zones).  
• After the Report Engine is installed and configured for performance data, you must wait for a minimum of 3 hours to see data in the performance report because this report shows hourly summarized data. 

Performance data

• External attribute set acts as a filter while transferring performance data from BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server to Report Engine. Hence only the attributes required for reporting purpose has to be defined under this attribute set. Performance of the data transfer is directly proportional to the number of attributes eligible for data transfer.
• To optimize Report Engine performance, reduce unwanted data at source. Define external report attribute set carefully to get only required data transferred to report engine. For example, if you want to show CPU utilization in report, add only “Processor Time” or “User Time” attributes and do not add “Idle Time”.

Time zone considerations

• The Report Engine installer sometimes does not detect the time zone of the operating system on which Report engine is being installed. You should make sure to update the correct time zone on the Time Zone Selection page of the Report Engine installer. 
• If there are multiple Report Engines connected to one reporting database, all these report engines should be in the same time zone. 

Upgrade Best Practices

• Take the backup of the database before starting the upgrade process.
• Take the backup of the Universe and Reports (including Custom Reports)
• Take the backup of the RAC Configuration Files before migrating Report Engine to next version.
• Before upgrading, review the retention requirements for your existing Report Engine for impact, event and performance data. If the current data retention is higher than what you expect, reduce the retention to remove unwanted data and enable faster migration process.
• Before upgrading, back up the entire Report Engine folder. To reduce the size of the backup, you can remove the report engine logs older than 2 days (optional).  
• During the data transfer at the time of migration, review the available disk space and the requirements for the extra disk. It retains the old history of the impact and event data and creates the copy of data into the new schema structure.

Data retention

Diagnostic SQLs

Database tuning

• If there are multiple disk drives to store the database, place potentially contending data filegroups (SQL Server) or potentially contending tablespace datafiles (Oracle) on separate disks. In Report engine, potentially contending entities are stats data and hourly data.  See the best practices for individual database vendor to achieve the maximum possible IO read and write performance on your setup.
• While adding the files in filegroup, you must not set the maximum filesize to Unrestricted file growth. While adding the datafiles to tablespace, you must not set the maximum size to Unlimited. 
• Depending on the free memory available on the system, set the appropriate maximum memory to the database process to make efficient usage of available hardware resources.
• In case of SQL Server, ensure that the SQL Server Agent is running and check the history of the SQL Server jobs for reported errors.
• BMC recommends that you use 1 report engine database instance for 1 report engine database user schema.

Report Engine Database monitoring

• Disk space
• Filegroup (SQL Server)
• Tablespace (Oracle)
• SQL Server Agent process (SQL Server)

Where to go from here

Install TrueSight Operations Management Report Engine.