Cognos Performance Troubleshooting

Presenters

James Salmon – Marketing Manager

James.Salmon@budgetingsolutions.co.uk

Andy Ellis – Senior BI Consultant

Andy.Ellis@budgetingsolutions.co.uk
Want to ask a question?

We will answer as many as time permits or directly by email

 About Budgeting Solutions

• Established in 2005

• IBM Business Analytics Premier Business Partner

• Worked with over 200 Blue-Chip Clients

• Area’s we specialise in: Sales, Operations & Finance

• Extensive expertise working within Finance departments

Issues we solve: Services we offer:

• Planning • Management Consulting

• Budgeting • Consulting
• Forecasting • Training
• Consolidation • Helpdesk Support
• Reporting
• Analysis
Our Customers
Agenda

Overview

A detective story…whodunnit ?

Hardware

Server configuration

Cognos Settings

Data

Infrastructure

Some tools to assist

Where to Start ?

Network, switches, bandwidth, other applications

Everyone is different

There are so many potential areas that can be affected by performance

Can only make general suggestions

Some may not be applicable or even possible in every installation

Every installation is different

Can originate outside Cognos – Network, Database server, host server

architecture

Fire Prevention v Fire Fighting

 Recent Poll of Users

Typical pain points in Cognos performance

1. Report Performance
2. Dashboard response
3. System stability
4. Concurrent User load
5. Cube build performance

Poll by Senturus , June 2015

Server Hardware

Server Specifications – online kb articles, or see your

business partner or IBM account manager

RAM requirements – 16GB for 2 concurrent users, the

more memory the better

Distributed Environments – load balancing; fail over;

scalable

Physical v Virtual Server considerations

Ensure that and Anti-virus software installed on the server

has the Cognos url as a trusted site, otherwise everything
will be scanned, inc report building
Server Hardware
The more users, the longer the
reports take to run

More servers share the load and

give better reporting performance

For distributed environments, create rules to

groups or users, report types or even packages to
different application servers
Interactive Reporting
Batch Reporting
Physical v Virtual
Most organisations running on virtual platforms

Great way to achieve distributed environment, vastly improved over the

years

Performance benchmarks between physical and virtual very close

- Easily manageable
- Can allocate more resources as required

But
- 5-10% overhead
- Dedicated resources
Cognos Server Settings

Cognos Server Settings and Cognos Service Settings

Concurrent Users

Distpatcher Tuning – 93 categories

Affinity Requests

Quick Fixes

Logging Levels
Concurrent Users
IBM Sizing Documents

Rule of thumb to calculate

100:10:1

For every 100 named users

10 Active Users (viewing reports)

1 Concurrent (heavy interactive user)

For smaller installations there are likely to be more concurrent users

Other Server Settings
Enable IIS/Apache caching
All images, javascripts etc will only be retrieved after the content
expiration period, otherwise retrieval every time.

Scheduled Reports producing large emails

If 10MB or bigger SMTP service may reject and will sit there. Cognos will
retry every hour as it creates a temp file every time it re-tries.

Temporary Files
Cognos will create large temporary files as part of the report process and
cause the disk to fill. Monitor the temp directory and make sure there is enough
space to write to
Managing the Working Day
Peak Demand
– Most organisations have a peak period of demand, typically during normal
business hours
– Determine the start and end time to control the number of concurrent jobs

System Performance Tuning – Request Wait Times

– You can specify how long a user’s request will stay in the queue before
timing out
– You can also limit the maximum execution the report service to prevent
users from executing long report jobs
Affinity Requests

High Affinity (high response time)

Report Viewer (return, run again)
HTML navigation (Top, Bottom, Up, Down)
Delivery Options (Save, Print, Email)

Low Affinity (run slower and need more time)

Report Querying
Report Authoring (query validation, metadata retrieval)
Administrative (test data source, jobs, schedules)

Peak and Non-Peak Hours

Formula for Initial Tuning

There are 2 report processes so the number of connections is

2 x 1 High affinity requests = 2 connections
8 x 2 Low affinity requests = 16 connections
18 connections in total
Websphere Liberty Profile

For 10.2.2 has replaced Tomcat. Defaults to 768MB , least amount of memory
for fast start-up.
Should be set to 1.5 (for balance between start-up and operating speed) or 2
(for maximum operating speed) times that value if you have lots of memory on
the server
General
32 bit v 64 bit
• access more memory
• faster execution
• better system stability
• all future Cognos releases on 64 bit

Dynamic Query Mode

• 64 bit technology
• In memory to automatically aggregate and optimise queries
• but - packages and models changed to use DQM, DMR from
relational JDBC connections
• very large data sets

Dynamic Cubes (future webinar)

• more features added since release – performance – maintenance
• similar to Transformer aggregate aware
• time categories as Transformer…end of life ?
Saved Output Reports
• Run once overnight and always reference saved version
 Data Issues
Data Tuning
Keys and indexes on tables

Data Warehouse - Star Schema

Less joins, therefore quicker
Quick to understand
Needed for Dynamic Cubes

Summary Tables
Condense large fact tables to several summary tables
Jobs to refresh summaries and DBA assistance

Power Cubes
Still valid option for drilling, aggregation but latency, build time

Framework Manager
Whilst it can do many things, keep simple
Views – joins over different views can adversely affect performance
For complex queries, views significantly improve report performance
as all data processing is performed by the database. Used for performance
optimisation strategy
ETL Issues

Logging (eg SQL Full, Simple)

Remove keys and index before adding data; rebuild

afterwards

Full load v incremental

SQL, use NO LOCK on source data

Use profiling tools in databases to suggest best index to

build and other potential performance enhancements
Cognos Logging Settings
High logging levels will have a negative impact on
performance.

Full logging never advised in production environment and if

under instruction from IBM Support, they will always tell you
turn off afterwards.

Every service, logging level should be Basic or less – will

log errors with least impact.
Cognos Configuration

Ad hoc sorting and querying would benefit for increased Sort Buffer Size

Under the Environment section is the Sort buffer size in MB. The default
value is 4 MB.
Typically this can be safely increased 4 to 8 times.

Change this value to 32.

Report Studio Settings
Depending upon your database, check the following options on a report:-

Processing Database Only

Rollup Processing Database
Execution Optimisation All Rows
Use Local Cache No
Disable ‘Selection Based Interactivity’
Minimise number of hotspots in chart to 0, if not required
Drill Behaviour-
Report Studio Settings

Tools > Validation Options

Report Studio validation levels can be changed. Switching to Information gives

more detailed information and may give additional areas to look at for elements
in the report that Cognos considers to be ‘less than perfect’
Content Store / Log Files
Should aim to keep Content Store as lean as possible
Saved output versions – delete or archived to secondary storage
Removed users
Remove old reports
Remove old package versions

Log Files
Tidy up
Delete .dmp files (but try and resolve reasons why as indicator of
serious issue), can be large
c:\Program Files\IBM\Cognos\C10_64\bin64
Delete anything ‘core’, ‘javacore’, ‘snap’

https://allthingscognos.wordpress.com/2014/08/05/maintenance-of-ibm-cognos-
10-bi-servers/
Cognos Audit
Cognos also includes a pre-built set of audit reports and the corresponding
framework manager model to access an Audit database

Can be added to and modified.

Can provide history of what, who, where, when etc

Also installed /bin/logviewV2.exe – better way of looking at cogserver.log file

Join us on 17th September for a full explanation of this facility – how to install,
where you can find the reports and also how to modify or create your own to give
a dashboard view.
Cognos Administration Monitoring

You can define thresholds for various parts of the system (system, servers,
dispatchers, services) which will provide red, amber, green indicators.

Agents can be set up to monitor these metrics and could send your system
administrator an email when a threshold value has been exceeded.

See Administration and Security Guide for more details

Infrastructure
Performance depends on the characteristics of your infrastructure

• Ideally, the IBM Cognos server components should be connected by a network

with 100 Mb of available capacity

• Network bandwidth between a Web browser and a Web server does not affect
system scalability, but does affect user performance

• Use true server computers, rather than fast Workstations

The complexity of your security infrastructure can increase response time

• Because Cognos notification service generates additional email traffic, ensure

that your mail server can scale to support the increased load
Quick Fixes

ISAPI instead of CGI, best practice for multiple users. CGI for low users, test
environments, proof of concepts.

IIS Content Expiration, mentioned before. Cognos portal (over 600 images)
being constantly loaded.

Dynamic Query Mode – if not using then switch off in Cognos Configuration,
can save up to 1 GB of memory per server.
Summary

Many places where your performance could be improved

There are no hard and fast rules as every installation will be

different and be affected by different environmental aspects

Trial and Error on changes, don’t make too many at once

maybe a combination of data and Cognos settings

Use tools already in the systems to assist in monitoring

- Metrics thresholds and Audit reports
- Third party tools for monitoring

It is better to do Fire prevention that Fire fighting

Technical Webinar Series

Future Webinars to include :-

Auditing the Cognos Environment – September 17th

https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/5453359238995528962
Cognos Planning Migration to Cognos TM1 – October 7th
https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/8820427782081333506
External Data in Spreadsheets – October 22nd
https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/4656575048798940674
IBM Cloud or On-Premise? – November 5th
https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/7425625814120272642
My Data Sets – November 19th
https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/8803120369677132034
Spreadsheets & Performance Management – December 3rd
https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/7021953313618839298
New Release Highlights – December 10th
https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/4435527032127656962
Training Academy

Prices start from £995 per day for up to 6 people on site , or hosted at our
Nottingham central office.

To view more of our training courses visit the website:

http://www.budgetingsolutions.co.uk/services/cognos-training/

Email: amanda.gibson@budgetingsolutions.co.uk

Call: 0115 853 2863

Q&A