Best Practices

The topics on this page describe some best practices that you can use while performing various tasks in BMC TrueSight Operations Management Reporting:

General Best Practices

All components of Report Engine should be in the same network as TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server.
While installing BMC TrueSight Operations Management Report Engine on Solaris 11.2, select only a first option, that is, Install BMC TrueSight Operations Management Report Engine 10.0; and import Universe and Reports manually on BusinessObjects post-install.
Clocks of all components specially the TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server (Source system) and the Report engine server should be in sync. 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 installation of Report engine, It takes up to 3 hours to get performance data in reports. For server capacity reports showing daily summarized data, the minimum lead time is 1 day.

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.
Server capacity report is designed to use out of box attribute sets (such as Total CPU Utilization, Free disk space, Real Memory Used). Ensure that you add appropriate attributes in the respective attribute set.
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.
BusinessObjects and Report engine must be in the same time zone. However, BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server and Report Engine can be in the different time zones.
If there are multiple Report Engines connected to one reporting database, all these report engines should be in the same time zone.

BusinessObjects Best Practices

Use correct aggregation level while creating reports. For example, use daily aggregation level in monthly report so that you can see one row for a day, thus thirty rows to display data for a month. Similarly, use hourly aggregation level in daily reports and use timestamp aggregation level to see raw data. Use higher aggregation level for better performance. For example, use daily aggregation level as it is faster than hourly.
Split larger reports into smaller by adding filters. For e.g. one report for all 500 devices can be broken into 5 reports of 100 devices.
Schedule report refresh after 7 AM in the morning. There are batch jobs scheduled at 5 AM that summarizes the hourly data into daily data and takes around 1 hour to complete. Running a report refresh after these batch jobs enables you to get the latest data in reports.
Use JDBC connection to avoid oracle client and version related issues.
Use embedded database provided with SAP BusinessObjects as the BusinessObjects repository. You should not use Reporting database as their repository.
All Solaris operating system patches must be installed as per the SAP BusinessObjects documents.
On Solaris, root user cannot perform SAP BusinessObjects installation. Create another user and use it for the installation. Ensure that the new user has all the permissions to access the directory you plan to install SAP BusinessObjects.
To establish database connection as well as export and import of universe, SAP BusinessObjects does not have a tool or utility for Solaris operating system. Use another Windows computer that has SAP BusinessObjects installed.
Note
SAP BusinessObjects installer does not have any GUI. It has a menu-based interface (text-based).

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

According to your requirements, to generate a report on history data for each aggregation in reporting, set appropriate retention using the configureRetention CLI command. For example, if you require event report for last 3 months, set event data retention to 90 days.

For better database sizing and performance of reports, keep the exact retention for each type of data. It also applies to event and impact reports.

For more information, see Performance-tuning.

Diagnostic SQLs

Run the following query to get Report Engine setup details:

select CELLSERVERKEY SERVER_ID, r.RE_ID, RE_HOST_NAME, BPPM_SERVER_HOSTNAME, DB_HOSTNAME BPPM_DB_HOSTNAME, DB_TYPE BPPM_DB_TYPE, c.name from reuniv.re_config r, reuniv.re_cell_server_config k, reuniv.sms_im_config c, reuniv.bppm_server_Config b where k.re_id= r.re_id and c.cell_id= k.cell_id and b.server_id= k.bppm_server_id;
Run the following query to get the list of all attributes that Report Engine is collecting data from BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management If you do not see attributes you want to collect data for, then you need to add those attributes under External Report AttributeSet on BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server.

select ATTRIBUTESETNAME , ATTRIBUTENAME from reuniv.externalreportattributeset order by ATTRIBUTESETNAME, ATTRIBUTENAME;
Run the following query to check Data collection in the STATS_DATA table. This query displays data collection from yesterday.

select reuniv.rpt_trunc(TIMERECORDED,'HH24') Timerecorded,count(*) Total_datapoints, count(distinct ATTRIBUTEID) Attribute_count from reuniv.stats_data where timerecorded> reuniv.rpt_trunc(reuniv.rpt_sysdate()-1,'DD') group by reuniv.rpt_trunc(TIMERECORDED,'HH24') order by reuniv.rpt_trunc(TIMERECORDED,'HH24');
Run the following query to check Data collection in the HOURLY_DATA table. This query displays data collection from yesterday.

select reuniv.rpt_trunc(TIMERECORDED,'HH24') Timerecorded,count(*) Total_datapoints, count(distinct ATTRIBUTEID) Attribute_count from reuniv.hourly_data where timerecorded> reuniv.rpt_trunc(reuniv.rpt_sysdate()-1,'DD') group by reuniv.rpt_trunc(TIMERECORDED,'HH24') order by reuniv.rpt_trunc(TIMERECORDED,'HH24');
Run the following query to check Data collection in the DAILY_DATA table. This query displays data collection from last seven days.

select TIMERECORDED,count(*) Total_datapoints, count(distinct ATTRIBUTEID) Attribute_count from reuniv.daily_data where timerecorded> reuniv.rpt_trunc(reuniv.rpt_sysdate()-7,'DD') group by TIMERECORDED order by TIMERECORDED;
Run the following query to check Oracle scheduled jobs. This query provides whether any job is broken or correct value for next scheduled run is displayed. Some of the jobs are scheduled to run hourly and some of them are scheduled to run daily.

select to_char(next_date,'dd-mm-yyyy hh24:mi:ss')||', '||broken||', '|| what from reuniv.user_jobs order by next_Date;

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 components monitoring

Report Engine Database

Configure BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server, BMC Performance Manager Portal, or a database-related Knowledge Module to monitor the Report Engine database health and database operating system health. For example, Oracle Knowledge Module. The following components must be monitored apart from other database components:

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

Monitor the individual Database processes using the process monitoring.

Report Engine and SAP Business Object

Configure BMC TrueSight Infrastructure Management Server or BMC Performance Manager Portal to monitor the operating system health. The following components must be monitored apart from other operating system components:

Memory
CPU health

Monitor the individual processes using process monitoring.