Presentation Name - SAPPHIRE NOW + ASUG Annual Conference

September 10-13, 2012 Orlando, Florida

Using Business Objects to Monitor Business Objects Usage Steve Krandel & Wendy Halle

A Few Words about Steve…..  8th time as a presenter at the Business Objects Conference  Started as a Business Objects customer (1996)  Proof of concept using 4.0.3  Live deployment on 4.0.5a – 200+ ad hoc users  Presales engineer (1997-1999)  Consultant/partner from (1999-2004)  Back to being a customer in August 2004  Speaker at several user groups in the western US  San Jose, San Francisco, LA, Orange County, San Diego, Denver…  Frequent contributor to discussion groups  www.tek-tips.com www.ittoolbox.com  Charter member and moderator for B B  busobj.forumtopics.com

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A Few Words about Wendy…..  2nd time as a presenter at the Business Objects Conference  Defined the charter for Intuit’s BI Competency Center (2006)  Redefining over the next year as a COE

 10+ years as a BI Analyst  5+ years working with Business Objects

 …….and she works for/with Steve

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A few words about       

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Business Objects standard BI tool  Current version BO XI R3 SP3 FP3.6 Non-SAP customer 340 universes Approximately 2600+ active users in FY12 (~1250/mo) 175 database connections  Oracle, SQL Server, Quick Base, Netezza…. 99%+ Web Intelligence Reports Development Environment (Dev & QA together)  Universe development  Report development to support initial universe release Production Environment  Report development area  Production report area Decentralized development with a COE model

Top 5 reasons to audit 5. 4. 3. 2.

Helps us predict growth in usage Shows what is being used Shows who is using the system Identifies resource hogs

1. Justifies our existence

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Why this topic?  Then: 3.2 Caused some HUGE disk space issues  FRS filled up within 7 days of going live

 Now: Too many large reports choking the system  Future: What can we remove before migrating to BI 4.0 Results:  Reduced schedules by 17%  Reduce drain on system, database and file system

 Removed over 20% of logins  Removed personal reports  Removed schedules 6

Can you have too much stuff?

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Why this topic?

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Trend of users per month  Users

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Overall universe usage  Queries against universes

Always interesting to see how many “critical” and “retired” universes never get used.

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Basic metrics with audit data  Logins and other actions (by week and/or month)

Audit data for session logins not writing to database from January - April.

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Learning how the audit data works  Actions with no logins Object Created/modified

File Event triggered

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Audit Date Structure – high level Report Objects Audit Details

Actions Audit Events

(name, objects, folder, universes)

(retrieve, refresh, schedule)

Universe aliases the detail table multiple times for the different detail types. 15

Actions and Report Object combinations Document Refreshed Document Retrieved

Document Name

Session ID

Universe Name Object Name (Unv Object)

Object CUID

Parent CUID

User Name

Object Folder Path

Object Name (Report name)

Scheduling Succeeded

Not all Report Objects work with each Action Name 16

Events with detail types

Report used to help us see all possible combinations. 17

Unused Scheduled Reports

 Rating evaluates the average run time and how often the report is viewed or distributed  Reach out to owners for reports that run long, often and are never viewed. 18

Who is using what?

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Enhance auditing with repository data  Infolytik CMS Connect Community Edition  Free tool for up to 100,000 objects  Data connector to repository, universe and reports  No problem with limits so far

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Pros

Cons

Free for up to 100,000 objects

Free version unsupported

Easy to use universe out of the box

Must have Java running on the server where it’s installed (i.e. Apache)

Build reports to merge with audit data

Reformat some audit data to match up (i.e. folder separated by “\” not “/”)

Includes data other than just documents

Cannot modify the universe

Finding large report files  This list includes:  Scheduled report outputs  Scheduled report inputs  All other saved reports  Used in a publication to notify users of large files

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Scheduled reports  When: Server memory errors on the instance manager  What: Check for large input files  Why: When the job runs, it pulls the original of the report into memory to process for the output. The original is stored in the Input FRS folder structure. The larger the input file, the more memory it uses to process the job.

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Duplicate Reports

 At least 5 people have personal copies in Inbox or Personal Folders  Some copies large; some copies small  Feedback for report developer to make potential changes 23

Login reports  Use LDAP authentication  Users submit a ticket to the help desk for access  When most employees leave, the help desk system generates a ticket to disable access  Removed 1000+ users by running some reports to see:  Who isn’t in LDAP any more  Who hasn’t logged in

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Employees leave the company  LDAP users are systematically joined to a specific group  Look for users not in that group

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Who isn’t logging in  Once a user logs in, the LDAP Alias is created  This report shows:  last login – if ever  how many personal documents or schedules they own

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Unused reports  What about documents with:  No activity?  No audit data?

 Why do you care?  Disk space? So what…  User sees 50+ reports in a folder and few are used

 Two components:  CMS Connect  Audit Data

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All unused documents – no audit data for last 6 months

 No audit activity for last 6 months  Audit data missing for January – April which is part of that time  Use last updated date to help you decide what should be removed 28

Some valuable tools for us  Repository Scan Utility  Removes links from the repository when the files cannot be found.  Removes files from the FRS (Input and Output) when a corresponding CMS entry cannot be found

 Inbox Cleanup Utility  Prompts for a date range and removes unread inbox documents.

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Additional tools  BOB Downloads: Found tools created by others to help us  WID Scanner Report: original repository scan solution:  Deski report using macros to extract repository data  Creates an Access DB  Put universe on top of Access DB

 Schedules, Dependencies and Destinations  Excel macro reads the repository  Shows all schedule details on one sheet including:  Events used by the report  Email destinations  File location destinations

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Schedule Dependencies and Destinations  Easy to find schedules that need to be modified for:  Change in server destination  Change in event  Emailed to users who are not longer in the company

 See how and event name maps to an event file Email or File output?

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Details about the destination

Event name and event file location

Audit Data Mart  Restructured the data for performance.  Simpler data model  Pre-defined metrics

 Explorer  Answer questions quickly  Why are we missing universe in audit data?

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Using Explorer to answer questions

 No universe – remember universe only on document refresh  Someone views an instance and closes it  Views/refreshes and saves as a new document  Original has the universe  New does not have the universe

 Save as vs. Move: Move has a parent CUID of the original; save as has a new CUID with matching parent CUID. 33

Understanding the “blank” universe

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Questions & Answers (hopefully)

Steve: [email protected] Wendy: [email protected] 35