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
Areas we specialise in: Sales, Operations & Finance
Extensive expertise working within Finance departments

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Agenda
Overview
A detective storywhodunnit ?
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 users 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 Transformerend 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-cognos10-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, dont 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

https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/4435527032127656962

December 10th

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