Issue: LDAP roles not assigned to users after migration from 3.1 to 4.1

Cause:

Assumption: Groups might not added before migration.

Detailed background of issue:

Assume migrated 3.1 objects to 4.1 (New system).

LDAP groups are not syncing for all our users unless I manually re-create their LDAP alias.  But aliases assigned to all users successfully. For example, <User> has a valid LDAP alias, shown here in the Properties section of his user profile:

However, when we look at Member Of, his Information Technology LDAP group does not appear:

Actual assigned LDAP group should show as below. As of now we are deleting alias --> recreating Enterprise alias --> deleting enterprise alias and finally --> Re-creating LDAP group alias.

Update groups and users with alias option is not working using on-demand option.

Resolution:

• Try with on-demand option as this is worked for me in Development environment.
• Remove LDAP groups and add again in CMC LDAP configuration.
  

Happy New Year!

The end of 2015 meant the end of mainstream support for SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1 and SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0. However, end of support does not mean end of the world, according to SAP Mentor Greg Myers (see related article, End of Support Does Not Equal End of World). However, some organizations may be affected by Microsoft's decision to stop supporting Internet Explorer 8, 9, and 10 as of today, January 12, 2016 (see Microsoft's official statement or SAP KB 2264238). Keep in mind that later editions of XI 3.1, BI 4.0 and BI 4.1 all provide IE 11 support (see related SCN article, SAP Support for Internet Explorer 11 Can Head Off Security Woes).

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence BI 4.1 SP7

The most recent release of the BI 4.1 platform is Support Pack 7, which has all of the goodies of Support Pack 6 (see Christian Ah-Soon's excellent write-up) and adds support for Windows 10 on the desktop and Suse Linux 12 and Red Hat 7 on the server. However, there are some curious omissions in the supported platforms document, most notably Microsoft Office 2016 and the latest releases of the Adobe Flash player (version 17 is the highest version supported but version 20 is the highest version shipping).

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence BI 4.2

While still not generally available (see related SCN Article, Waiting for SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.2), SAP released BI 4.2 Support Pack 1 at the end of 2015. Some customers have opted to enroll in the ramp-up program, although most will likely wait for Support Pack 2, which will be the GA release. BI 4.2 promises a lot of new features (see related article, What's New in SAP BI 4.2), plus improved upgrade workflows and linked universe support for those customers still on earlier releases.

What now?

Most organizations that use SAP BI should have two platform objectives for 2016 - adopting SAP Lumira in their BI landscape and upgrading to SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence 4.2. Unless you are actively patching up to address a bug or gain platform support (such as IE11 support), I suggest waiting for the general availability of BI 4.2. If you've never made the leap to BI4, it's time to get off of now-unsupported software. Consider entering the early adopter program for BI 4.2 and take advantage of its upgrade process improvements, knowing that the GA patch will be waiting for you before it's time to go live.

What are your organization's BI priorities in 2016?

Hello Everyone,

Here I would like to highlight some of the new features available with BI 4.2 from the Platform perspective. Some of you would have already aware of these features, but here I want to list it for the newbies.

1. User Notifications:

This is the feature which helps administrator to broadcast information to users. Consider the case where the administrator of BO system wants to send a message to all/any particular users. This can be achieved through User Notifications from CMC. The administrator can specify the timeline for the notification to be visible. The notification can also be sent as an Email which is mapped to the user.

How to create Notifications:

Go to BO CMC->Events->User Notifications

Specify the timeline for the notification to be visible and enter the Title and Description:

Manage Subscribers:

Here the subscribers can be users or groups

How to view the Notifications:

Once the user log into BI Launchpad, the notification would be highlighted and also available under My Alerts section. By clicking “See More” the details can be seen

2. Commentary:

This service is provided by platform for all BI Clients. The comments are stored in Audit DB by default but it’s customizable

Where to Customize:

Go to BO CMC->Applications->BI Commentary Application->Properties

The comments are managed by rights, and the authorizations on commenting to be defined on individual folder or object level

Eg: If I want to enable rights for the documents under folder say “Murali_Folder”, go to its User Security and select the user, assign the rights

Adding/Managing comments are already discussed in http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-67437 which you can refer.

3. Recycle Bin:

This feature enables the user to restore accidentally deleted content. It supports only Public Folders and Content.

Where to Enable:

Go to BO CMC->Applications->Recycle Bin Application

The threshold (No of days) can be set and once the threshold reaches the files will be removed from Recycle Bin

Some of the deletes files available in Recycle Bin

4. Administrator Cockpit:

If the administrator want to get a fast insight about the BO systems, he can access this feature, which gives, simplified drillable visual page with key information like list of Servers/status, Jobs, etc and specific actions are possible

5. Promotion Manager:

With BI 4.2, the administrator can do a selective retrieval of objects from LCMBIAR file. New job will be initiated based on the selection made. This would be helpful when the LCMBIAR file contains more no. of objects and the administrator want to promote only lesser objects.

Also the admin can utilize connection overrides while promoting content

6. Rest API:

These APIs would help

• For User Management (Add/Create/Modify)
• Uploading/Downloading documents to/from Platform

7. Upgrade Manager:

During the upgrade,

• the administrator can specify the Log Level
• also he can control the content(Objects) while upgrading

8. Audit:

In BI 4.2, the scalability of Auditing has been improved, which means when more events logged, the repository can be accessed by more users. There will not be any performance bottlenecks w.r.t Auditing.

Please note that this is in the Beta release and it may change in the GA release without prior notice.

Thanks for reading and hope this helps you.

Regards,

Murali

Quite often, I had always wondered if there was an easy out to export the results from a CMC to excel.

There is of course, the tool that can be found online, that runs against a macro and exports it to Excel, but I wanted to see if something can be done directly out of the CMC itself.

With this background, I stumbled on this little workaround that uses a little known plug in that can do that. Of course, it involves a few steps, but in the end it will get the job done.

Uploading the document, for the benefit it of SCN users.

This is my first upload here, so I do not know how this works. Hopefully it will be useful to someone.

Disclaimer: This will work only with FIREFOX BROWSER

1. Open CMC in a Browser ( Firefox)
2. Activate FIREBUG Plug in ( found on the top right hand side of the toolbar)

3.     This will open a new window or a small window at the bottom of the current browser. You also have an option of opening it in a new window if it opens in a same window by clicking the icon

4.     Click on the little Arrow icon, found on the top left hand side of the menu bar of the firebug window

5.     Highlight the first row in CMC, that you want the query to be saved into Excel

6.     The min u do the selection in the above step, the code in the FIREBUG window gets highlighted on the row that the data on the CMC window was selected

7.     Carefully, identify the <Table id> code, which can be found a few lines above the selected

8.     Locate <DIV ID> which is right above the <TABLE ID> pointer and place the mouse on that line, right click the mouse and select  “COPY INNER HTML”           from the selected pop up menu

9.     Save this code to a Notepad and save it as .HTML file or a.XLS file

10.     Either of the 2 files will take a long time to open and will also get saved with the icons from CMC.

11.     Copy/select individually the columns that are needed, to the next tab for a cleaner and neater output.

12.     Finally … since CMC has a restriction to display only 500 objects at one time, you might have to do this multiple times, by navigating to the next page           and starting the process from step 1, if your list of objects runs into more than 500.

Hi everyone,

I wanted to make our Crystal Reports customers on the SCN community aware of some great promotions we’ve got running right now with a few listing/review sites.

Basically, if you leave a detailed review of Crystal Reports on one or all of these sites, they will reward you a gift card for your time.  This is open to customers only, no partners or employees.  All reviews are vetted by the sites for authenticity before you receive your gift card.

The G2crowd offer is open globally. The Software Insider offer is US only.  The TrustRadius offer is global too.

So if you’re from the US, feel free to leave a review on all 3 sites.

Here are the details on how to submit a review and get your gift card(s)!

Review Crystal Reports with G2crowd:

Leave an authentic, detailed review and G2crowd will reward you with a $25 VISA gift card upon their review and posting of the submission. This is open to the first 40 people only, so it’s a first come, first serve offer. This is open to people from all countries.
Click here to create your review

Review Crystal Reports with Software Insider:

Leave an authentic, detailed review and Software Insider will reward you with a $15 Amazon gift card for your first review, and a $10 Amazon gift card for each review thereafter.  Once your review is screened and is posted to the site, you will receive your gift card.
This program is valid until March 31, 2016 and valid in the US only.
Click here to create your review

Review Crystal Reports with TrustRadius:

Leave an authentic, detailed review and TrustRadius will reward you with a $25 Amazon gift card upon their review and posting of the submission. This is open to the first 40 people only, so it’s a first come, first serve offer. This is open to people from all countries.
Click here to create your review

Thanks,

Ryan Oliver
SAP Digital team

It's a new year, and that means licensing updates!

We have simplified our license model to make it easier to understand, while still keeping the core components.

We have even provided a little bonus to customers that own the BI Suite license - you will now benefit automatically from runtime licenses of Data Integrator and Sybase IQ, and Sybase Power Designer!

No license conversions are needed. Simply go to Service Marketplace and download your new software.

You get:

• 8 cores of Sybase IQ
• 8 Cores of Data Integrator
• 1 named user of Sybase PowerDesiger

These are not full use licenses, so be sure to read the Software Use Rights to understand the restrictions. In short:

• Data Integrator cannot be clustered
• Sybase IQ runtime is limited to access by and through the SAP BusinessObjects BI Suite and SAP Predictive Analytics

Note that there is no new version of the BI Platform required to leverage this. No software upgrades are needed.

Those of you that own a similar sounding license called the 'BA&T SAP BusinessObjects BI Suite' will need to execute a license conversion to benefit from these new components.

We are also introducing a simpler version of the BI Suite called the 'SAP BusinessObjects BI Reporting' license. This includes Web Intelligence, Crystal Reports and the BI Platform only, and is intended for reporting-focused deployments.

We are removing some little used license from our price list:

• The 'Analytics Editions' that were a special bundle of Sybase IQ + Data Integrator + the BusinessObjects BI Suite
• The restricted use 'SAP BusinessObjects BI Suite for SAP Applications'
• The component model that allowed customers to purchase any of the individual BusinessObjects client tools

Customers that own any of these retired products are not impacted. You can continue to use these licenses and purchase more licenses from that license model.

Finally, it's important to remind everyone that our license metrics are unchanged. We continue to offer our BI software with the following metrics:

• The named user (NU) metric for users that need guaranteed access to the software, or for users that need to use most of the desktop software products.
• The concurrent session based license (CSBL) for casual users. This applies to the server components and Analysis for Office.
• The new public document metric for publicly sharing BI documents on the internet.

For more information, please read the licensing FAQ here.

Blair Wheadon

@BlairTWheadon

GM of Data Discovery

This is the start of what should be a four-part blog series around the new BusinessObjects (BOBJ) licensing offering. As a technologist and nerd at heart, I do my best to stay away from the licensing discussion, but I felt the new bundles are so compelling that I needed to blog about them.

It's been close on a year, I guess, since my last blog post so, for this announcement to spark the excitement to make this a four-part blog, you should know how fired up I am about this!!!

In case you missed the announcement (and for future reference, I think that February 3rd is Christmas Day in Vancouver), then you can read Blair Wheadon post here.

I've always believed that SAP has had the potential to offer their customers a great technology stack in the Analytics Space. So much so that back in 2012, yes 2012, I wrote the following blog on how I felt SAP should approach the market for the Classic BOBJ customer (scroll down to the EDW / Non-BW World). The funny thing re-reading that today is that the majority of what I wrote back then still holds true today! Enough of the history lessons…

Before I get into the finer details, I think a very important point here is that this offering is aimed at Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) or "classic BOBJ" customers. For the last few years I’ve often heard the BOBJ folks grumbling at conferences that SAP are only worried about their BW customers. So, to my fellow EDW peeps, Merry Christmas…. in February.

Instead of typing out 1000's of words as to how/why the added technologies will benefit you, what I have decided to do in Part 2 is compose a full video of all the technology in play and replicate the scenario of a BOBJ Oracle customer looking to take advantage of the added software.

So let's quickly process Blair’s post. Bundled in you now get:

SAP IQ

Those who read my posts or know me well will know that I did/do believe that SAP IQ is a thing of greatness. Instead of me rambling on about it here, please take a look at the awesomeness of SAP IQ below that I did in 2013. Watch from the 5 to 11 minute mark. Apologies in advance to the SQL Server fan boys as it's not pretty for you ...

So I pose the question to the EDW BOBJ folks: who out there would not benefit from having SAP IQ running under your universes, increasing performance and very importantly the experience of your end users? (I know I’m opening myself up here to what hopefully will be a healthy comments thread.)

With SAP IQ you will get:

• A columnar store (don’t worry, 99% of your SQL will work)
• Compression
• Massive data load speeds
• Insane performance on your queries
• A unicorn – that’s for James Oswald
• Run time edition
  • This means that it must be one of the BOBJ tools that queries this data.

What you won’t get:

• A transactional/OLTP database
  • We aim to get SAP IQ to bulk load at around 50-100k transactions per second (tps) using BULK loads, but if you want to do an INSERT INTO statement, then you’re looking at 1 tps.
  • SAP IQ is designed to store and query massive amount of data and not act as a transactional database under your source systems.

I guess you’re asking… well why doesn’t everyone in the world run SAP IQ … right? Well, in my honest external-to-SAP opinion, it’s always been a bit cost-prohibitive as it’s never been a  cheap offering! Having said that, I am yet to lose a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) battle with SAP IQ, but the end number often had to get approval from “higher up”. The brilliant news is that, as existing BOBJ customers, we no longer have to worry about that cost which frees up  our precious budget to all of you to buy me beers at the next conference we connect at!

In case you don’t believe me, maybe the folks from the Guinness World Records will sway you over the line as SAP IQ has the current world record for largest Data Warehouse.

SAP Data Integrator  (DI)

The use, or lack thereof, of ETL tools in EDW landscapes varies. I’ve often seen, and worked in, environments where complex SQL scripts and stored procedures rule the roost. Yes, they are efficient in terms of performance, but trust me, they are a nightmare to maintain or even enhance by anyone but the original developers. Good for job security… yes… but that’s about it. I often joke, although it’s not funny, that every company has a “Frank.sql” file with 100,000 lines of code that Frank was very proud of when he wrote it, but he’s now living in Europe as a ski instructor and everyone is too scared to change let alone enhance that code!

When I walk into landscapes like this and ask why there is no ETL tool, it’s often one of two scenarios and also a combination of the two:

1. The current SQL files are legacy and what have “always been there”
   1. a. I recently worked with a customer who had 8 different types of scripting methods to load data into their DWH – try maintain that!
2. Cost.. Enterprise-scale ETL tools once again aren’t cheap, but here again this is something you no longer have to worry about… did I mention those beers?

If you are in scenario 1 above, then yes, there will be investment and cost moving your existing code to DI, but the de-risking alone should get you excited about this project! Imagine sleeping well at night knowing that if things do go wrong, any skilled DI developer could come into your landscape and quickly see what the jobs are tying to do instead of spending weeks or months trying to figure out and then trying to change Frank.sql!

SAP PowerDesigner

SAP PowerDesigner is a great modelling tool (cue the Zoolander references) that I have used extensively. To be fair to the tool, I’ve used it mainly from a DWH design perspective, but it has many great attributes that should make a skilled data modeller drool!

The key feature to me, and I will showcase it in the Demo, is that PowerDesigner has the ability to quickly reverse engineer your entire DWH schema using ODBC. So, in one step, you have your existing data model. Then PowerDesigner has the nifty feature of “Switch RDBS” and it will convert your data model into SAP IQ syntax for you.

Once that is done, you can either:

1. 1. generate a DDL script to run on SAP IQ ; or
2. 2. generate the tables direct from PowerDesigner into SAP IQ .

The rule of thumb here for me is that PowerDesigner will take care of the 95 % (there are always some gremlins), and the great news here is that you can achieve this in a few minutes!

So where to from here?

I know putting a $ figure here is tricky and dangerous, but by my maths you’re looking at a good couple of hundred of these worth of additional software that is now getting bundled and included with your existing BI4.x spend.

What I would do, immediately, is acquire some hardware, whether virtual or physical, and stand up an instance of SAP IQ as a Proof of Concept (POC) . For a full list of supported platforms, you can find the PAM here (SMP login required).

Once SAP IQ is stood up, you can dump and load data from your existing RDBMS into SAP IQ and do some benchmark queries and I can almost guarantee my soon-to-be-built house that you will be positively blown away by the results.

As mentioned above, you can usePowerDesigner to help you move your existing schema to SAP IQ to fast-track this process, or even create duplicate jobs out of your existing ETL tool and change the target DB to be SAP IQ.

Once this is done and your BI4.x end users or developers can start to ask questions of the data that they have never been able to in the past, the wheels will move fast, so strap yourself in as it should be a wild ride. Many times before I have had POC SAP IQ servers that have become production at the drop of a hat. 

To wrap things up, I fired Blair Wheadon some questions around the new offering that I hope will clear up any confusion.

CV: You mention 8 cores of SAP IQ. Can this be a multiplex implementation or must it be simplex?

BW: SAP IQ is limited to a max of 8 cores across multiple instances. The sum of all cores cannot exceed 8. No restrictions on multiplex / simplex are mentioned in the software use rights document.

CV: For SAP IQ can you load the data natively or does it need to be loaded with Data Integrator?

BW: No restrictions on IQ data loading is mentioned in the software use rights, so native loading is supported.

CV: What happens when a customer needs to expand their landscape beyond the 8 cores? Are their additional run time licenses at a discounted rate?

BW: No. This restricted use license is only available with the BI Suite. Additional capacity requires the purchase of a full use SAP IQ license.

CV: Can you explain the main difference between Data Integrator and Data Services? I guess the question is which parts of Data Services are not included in Data Integrator?

BW: Data Services = Data Integrator + Data Quality + Text Data Processing + Metadata Management.

CV: The 8 core Data Integrator server - is it OK to split the IPS and make the Job Server use the 8 cores?

BW: Yes, this is the recommend configuration.

CV: The PowerDesigner license - is that a floating license for developers or can only one developer use that?

BW: It’s one CSBL. So it’s floating.

CV: How do you define a customer that owns a BI Suite license, i.e. which customers qualify?

BW: Any customer that owns any of the following material codes: 7018568, 7018569, 7017688, 7017689, 7017877

CV: Is it true that every time SAP IQ destroys a competitor’s database in a performance benchmark, an angel grows a set of wings?

BW: Yes. Unless it’s HANA that gets beat

CV: Does this apply to Edge customers?

BW: Yes.

CV: If a customer "thinks" they qualify but are not 100 % sure, then who’s the best person to speak to at SAP?

BW: The easiest way to find out is to log on to SAP Service Marketplace and see if they can find and download IQ.

CV: Will this increase the customer’s maintenance fee or will that stay as is?

BW: Maintenance fees will not change with this new functionality.

CV: Is this a limited time offering or is it safe to say that this is the new Analytics BI Suite offering going forward?

BW: This is a permanent offer.

I hope you enjoyed reading this blog and I'm super excited to bring you Part 2, which is already a Work in Progress!

Clint

This is the start of what should be a four-part blog series around the new BusinessObjects (BOBJ) licensing offering. As a technologist and nerd at heart, I do my best to stay away from the licensing discussion, but I felt the new bundles are so compelling that I needed to blog about them.

It's been close on a year, I guess, since my last blog post so, for this announcement to spark the excitement to make this a four-part blog, you should know how fired up I am about this!!!

In case you missed the announcement (and for future reference, I think that February 3rd is Christmas Day in Vancouver), then you can read Blair Wheadon post here.

I've always believed that SAP has had the potential to offer their customers a great technology stack in the Analytics Space. So much so that back in 2012, yes 2012, I wrote the following blog on how I felt SAP should approach the market for the Classic BOBJ customer (scroll down to the EDW / Non-BW World). The funny thing re-reading that today is that the majority of what I wrote back then still holds true today! Enough of the history lessons…

Before I get into the finer details, I think a very important point here is that this offering is aimed at Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) or "classic BOBJ" customers. For the last few years I’ve often heard the BOBJ folks grumbling at conferences that SAP are only worried about their BW customers. So, to my fellow EDW peeps, Merry Christmas…. in February.

Instead of typing out 1000's of words as to how/why the added technologies will benefit you, what I have decided to do in Part 2 is compose a full video of all the technology in play and replicate the scenario of a BOBJ Oracle customer looking to take advantage of the added software.

So let's quickly process Blair’s post. Bundled in you now get:

SAP IQ

Those who read my posts or know me well will know that I did/do believe that SAP IQ is a thing of greatness. Instead of me rambling on about it here, please take a look at the awesomeness of SAP IQ below that I did in 2013. Watch from the 5 to 11 minute mark. Apologies in advance to the SQL Server fan boys as it's not pretty for you ...

So I pose the question to the EDW BOBJ folks: who out there would not benefit from having SAP IQ running under your universes, increasing performance and very importantly the experience of your end users? (I know I’m opening myself up here to what hopefully will be a healthy comments thread.)

With SAP IQ you will get:

• A columnar store (don’t worry, 99% of your SQL will work)
• Compression
• Massive data load speeds
• Insane performance on your queries
• A unicorn – that’s for James Oswald
• Run time edition
  • This means that it must be one of the BOBJ tools that queries this data.

What you won’t get:

• A transactional/OLTP database
  • We aim to get SAP IQ to bulk load at around 50-100k transactions per second (tps) using BULK loads, but if you want to do an INSERT INTO statement, then you’re looking at 1 tps.
  • SAP IQ is designed to store and query massive amount of data and not act as a transactional database under your source systems.

I guess you’re asking… well why doesn’t everyone in the world run SAP IQ … right? Well, in my honest external-to-SAP opinion, it’s always been a bit cost-prohibitive as it’s never been a  cheap offering! Having said that, I am yet to lose a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) battle with SAP IQ, but the end number often had to get approval from “higher up”. The brilliant news is that, as existing BOBJ customers, we no longer have to worry about that cost which frees up  our precious budget to all of you to buy me beers at the next conference we connect at!

In case you don’t believe me, maybe the folks from the Guinness World Records will sway you over the line as SAP IQ has the current world record for largest Data Warehouse.

SAP Data Integrator  (DI)

The use, or lack thereof, of ETL tools in EDW landscapes varies. I’ve often seen, and worked in, environments where complex SQL scripts and stored procedures rule the roost. Yes, they are efficient in terms of performance, but trust me, they are a nightmare to maintain or even enhance by anyone but the original developers. Good for job security… yes… but that’s about it. I often joke, although it’s not funny, that every company has a “Frank.sql” file with 100,000 lines of code that Frank was very proud of when he wrote it, but he’s now living in Europe as a ski instructor and everyone is too scared to change let alone enhance that code!

When I walk into landscapes like this and ask why there is no ETL tool, it’s often one of two scenarios and also a combination of the two:

1. The current SQL files are legacy and what have “always been there”
   1. a. I recently worked with a customer who had 8 different types of scripting methods to load data into their DWH – try maintain that!
2. Cost.. Enterprise-scale ETL tools once again aren’t cheap, but here again this is something you no longer have to worry about… did I mention those beers?

If you are in scenario 1 above, then yes, there will be investment and cost moving your existing code to DI, but the de-risking alone should get you excited about this project! Imagine sleeping well at night knowing that if things do go wrong, any skilled DI developer could come into your landscape and quickly see what the jobs are tying to do instead of spending weeks or months trying to figure out and then trying to change Frank.sql!

SAP PowerDesigner

SAP PowerDesigner is a great modelling tool (cue the Zoolander references) that I have used extensively. To be fair to the tool, I’ve used it mainly from a DWH design perspective, but it has many great attributes that should make a skilled data modeller drool!

The key feature to me, and I will showcase it in the Demo, is that PowerDesigner has the ability to quickly reverse engineer your entire DWH schema using ODBC. So, in one step, you have your existing data model. Then PowerDesigner has the nifty feature of “Switch RDBS” and it will convert your data model into SAP IQ syntax for you.

Once that is done, you can either:

1. 1. generate a DDL script to run on SAP IQ ; or
2. 2. generate the tables direct from PowerDesigner into SAP IQ .

The rule of thumb here for me is that PowerDesigner will take care of the 95 % (there are always some gremlins), and the great news here is that you can achieve this in a few minutes!

So where to from here?

I know putting a $ figure here is tricky and dangerous, but by my maths you’re looking at a good couple of hundred of these worth of additional software that is now getting bundled and included with your existing BI4.x spend.

What I would do, immediately, is acquire some hardware, whether virtual or physical, and stand up an instance of SAP IQ as a Proof of Concept (POC) . For a full list of supported platforms, you can find the PAM here (SMP login required).

Once SAP IQ is stood up, you can dump and load data from your existing RDBMS into SAP IQ and do some benchmark queries and I can almost guarantee my soon-to-be-built house that you will be positively blown away by the results.

As mentioned above, you can usePowerDesigner to help you move your existing schema to SAP IQ to fast-track this process, or even create duplicate jobs out of your existing ETL tool and change the target DB to be SAP IQ.

Once this is done and your BI4.x end users or developers can start to ask questions of the data that they have never been able to in the past, the wheels will move fast, so strap yourself in as it should be a wild ride. Many times before I have had POC SAP IQ servers that have become production at the drop of a hat. 

To wrap things up, I fired Blair Wheadon some questions around the new offering that I hope will clear up any confusion.

CV: You mention 8 cores of SAP IQ. Can this be a multiplex implementation or must it be simplex?

BW: SAP IQ is limited to a max of 8 cores across multiple instances. The sum of all cores cannot exceed 8. No restrictions on multiplex / simplex are mentioned in the software use rights document.

CV: For SAP IQ can you load the data natively or does it need to be loaded with Data Integrator?

BW: No restrictions on IQ data loading is mentioned in the software use rights, so native loading is supported.

CV: What happens when a customer needs to expand their landscape beyond the 8 cores? Are their additional run time licenses at a discounted rate?

BW: No. This restricted use license is only available with the BI Suite. Additional capacity requires the purchase of a full use SAP IQ license.

CV: Can you explain the main difference between Data Integrator and Data Services? I guess the question is which parts of Data Services are not included in Data Integrator?

BW: Data Services = Data Integrator + Data Quality + Text Data Processing + Metadata Management.

CV: The 8 core Data Integrator server - is it OK to split the IPS and make the Job Server use the 8 cores?

BW: Yes, this is the recommend configuration.

CV: The PowerDesigner license - is that a floating license for developers or can only one developer use that?

BW: It’s one CSBL. So it’s floating.

CV: How do you define a customer that owns a BI Suite license, i.e. which customers qualify?

BW: Any customer that owns any of the following material codes: 7018568, 7018569, 7017688, 7017689, 7017877

CV: Is it true that every time SAP IQ destroys a competitor’s database in a performance benchmark, an angel grows a set of wings?

BW: Yes. Unless it’s HANA that gets beat

CV: Does this apply to Edge customers?

BW: Yes.

CV: If a customer "thinks" they qualify but are not 100 % sure, then who’s the best person to speak to at SAP?

BW: The easiest way to find out is to log on to SAP Service Marketplace and see if they can find and download IQ.

CV: Will this increase the customer’s maintenance fee or will that stay as is?

BW: Maintenance fees will not change with this new functionality.

CV: Is this a limited time offering or is it safe to say that this is the new Analytics BI Suite offering going forward?

BW: This is a permanent offer.

I hope you enjoyed reading this blog and I'm super excited to bring you Part 2, which is already a Work in Progress!

Clint

This is the start of what should be a four-part blog series around the new BusinessObjects (BOBJ) licensing offering. As a technologist and nerd at heart, I do my best to stay away from the licensing discussion, but I felt the new bundles are so compelling that I needed to blog about them.

It's been close on a year, I guess, since my last blog post so, for this announcement to spark the excitement to make this a four-part blog, you should know how fired up I am about this!!!

In case you missed the announcement (and for future reference, I think that February 3rd is Christmas Day in Vancouver), then you can read Blair Wheadon post here.

I've always believed that SAP has had the potential to offer their customers a great technology stack in the Analytics Space. So much so that back in 2012, yes 2012, I wrote the following blog on how I felt SAP should approach the market for the Classic BOBJ customer (scroll down to the EDW / Non-BW World). The funny thing re-reading that today is that the majority of what I wrote back then still holds true today! Enough of the history lessons…

Before I get into the finer details, I think a very important point here is that this offering is aimed at Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) or "classic BOBJ" customers. For the last few years I’ve often heard the BOBJ folks grumbling at conferences that SAP are only worried about their BW customers. So, to my fellow EDW peeps, Merry Christmas…. in February.

Instead of typing out 1000's of words as to how/why the added technologies will benefit you, what I have decided to do in Part 2 is compose a full video of all the technology in play and replicate the scenario of a BOBJ Oracle customer looking to take advantage of the added software.

So let's quickly process Blair’s post. Bundled in you now get:

SAP IQ

Those who read my posts or know me well will know that I did/do believe that SAP IQ is a thing of greatness. Instead of me rambling on about it here, please take a look at the awesomeness of SAP IQ below that I did in 2013. Watch from the 5 to 11 minute mark. Apologies in advance to the SQL Server fan boys as it's not pretty for you ...

So I pose the question to the EDW BOBJ folks: who out there would not benefit from having SAP IQ running under your universes, increasing performance and very importantly the experience of your end users? (I know I’m opening myself up here to what hopefully will be a healthy comments thread.)

With SAP IQ you will get:

• A columnar store (don’t worry, 99% of your SQL will work)
• Compression
• Massive data load speeds
• Insane performance on your queries
• A unicorn – that’s for James Oswald
• Run time edition
  • This means that it must be one of the BOBJ tools that queries this data.

What you won’t get:

• A transactional/OLTP database
  • We aim to get SAP IQ to bulk load at around 50-100k transactions per second (tps) using BULK loads, but if you want to do an INSERT INTO statement, then you’re looking at 1 tps.
  • SAP IQ is designed to store and query massive amount of data and not act as a transactional database under your source systems.

I guess you’re asking… well why doesn’t everyone in the world run SAP IQ … right? Well, in my honest external-to-SAP opinion, it’s always been a bit cost-prohibitive as it’s never been a  cheap offering! Having said that, I am yet to lose a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) battle with SAP IQ, but the end number often had to get approval from “higher up”. The brilliant news is that, as existing BOBJ customers, we no longer have to worry about that cost which frees up  our precious budget to all of you to buy me beers at the next conference we connect at!

In case you don’t believe me, maybe the folks from the Guinness World Records will sway you over the line as SAP IQ has the current world record for largest Data Warehouse.

SAP Data Integrator  (DI)

The use, or lack thereof, of ETL tools in EDW landscapes varies. I’ve often seen, and worked in, environments where complex SQL scripts and stored procedures rule the roost. Yes, they are efficient in terms of performance, but trust me, they are a nightmare to maintain or even enhance by anyone but the original developers. Good for job security… yes… but that’s about it. I often joke, although it’s not funny, that every company has a “Frank.sql” file with 100,000 lines of code that Frank was very proud of when he wrote it, but he’s now living in Europe as a ski instructor and everyone is too scared to change let alone enhance that code!

When I walk into landscapes like this and ask why there is no ETL tool, it’s often one of two scenarios and also a combination of the two:

1. The current SQL files are legacy and what have “always been there”
   1. a. I recently worked with a customer who had 8 different types of scripting methods to load data into their DWH – try maintain that!
2. Cost.. Enterprise-scale ETL tools once again aren’t cheap, but here again this is something you no longer have to worry about… did I mention those beers?

If you are in scenario 1 above, then yes, there will be investment and cost moving your existing code to DI, but the de-risking alone should get you excited about this project! Imagine sleeping well at night knowing that if things do go wrong, any skilled DI developer could come into your landscape and quickly see what the jobs are tying to do instead of spending weeks or months trying to figure out and then trying to change Frank.sql!

SAP PowerDesigner

SAP PowerDesigner is a great modelling tool (cue the Zoolander references) that I have used extensively. To be fair to the tool, I’ve used it mainly from a DWH design perspective, but it has many great attributes that should make a skilled data modeller drool!

The key feature to me, and I will showcase it in the Demo, is that PowerDesigner has the ability to quickly reverse engineer your entire DWH schema using ODBC. So, in one step, you have your existing data model. Then PowerDesigner has the nifty feature of “Switch RDBS” and it will convert your data model into SAP IQ syntax for you.

Once that is done, you can either:

1. 1. generate a DDL script to run on SAP IQ ; or
2. 2. generate the tables direct from PowerDesigner into SAP IQ .

The rule of thumb here for me is that PowerDesigner will take care of the 95 % (there are always some gremlins), and the great news here is that you can achieve this in a few minutes!

So where to from here?

I know putting a $ figure here is tricky and dangerous, but by my maths you’re looking at a good couple of hundred of these worth of additional software that is now getting bundled and included with your existing BI4.x spend.

What I would do, immediately, is acquire some hardware, whether virtual or physical, and stand up an instance of SAP IQ as a Proof of Concept (POC) . For a full list of supported platforms, you can find the PAM here (SMP login required).

Once SAP IQ is stood up, you can dump and load data from your existing RDBMS into SAP IQ and do some benchmark queries and I can almost guarantee my soon-to-be-built house that you will be positively blown away by the results.

As mentioned above, you can usePowerDesigner to help you move your existing schema to SAP IQ to fast-track this process, or even create duplicate jobs out of your existing ETL tool and change the target DB to be SAP IQ.

Once this is done and your BI4.x end users or developers can start to ask questions of the data that they have never been able to in the past, the wheels will move fast, so strap yourself in as it should be a wild ride. Many times before I have had POC SAP IQ servers that have become production at the drop of a hat. 

To wrap things up, I fired Blair Wheadon some questions around the new offering that I hope will clear up any confusion.

CV: You mention 8 cores of SAP IQ. Can this be a multiplex implementation or must it be simplex?

BW: SAP IQ is limited to a max of 8 cores across multiple instances. The sum of all cores cannot exceed 8. No restrictions on multiplex / simplex are mentioned in the software use rights document.

CV: For SAP IQ can you load the data natively or does it need to be loaded with Data Integrator?

BW: No restrictions on IQ data loading is mentioned in the software use rights, so native loading is supported.

CV: What happens when a customer needs to expand their landscape beyond the 8 cores? Are their additional run time licenses at a discounted rate?

BW: No. This restricted use license is only available with the BI Suite. Additional capacity requires the purchase of a full use SAP IQ license.

CV: Can you explain the main difference between Data Integrator and Data Services? I guess the question is which parts of Data Services are not included in Data Integrator?

BW: Data Services = Data Integrator + Data Quality + Text Data Processing + Metadata Management.

CV: The 8 core Data Integrator server - is it OK to split the IPS and make the Job Server use the 8 cores?

BW: Yes, this is the recommend configuration.

CV: The PowerDesigner license - is that a floating license for developers or can only one developer use that?

BW: It’s one CSBL. So it’s floating.

CV: How do you define a customer that owns a BI Suite license, i.e. which customers qualify?

BW: Any customer that owns any of the following material codes: 7018568, 7018569, 7017688, 7017689, 7017877

CV: Is it true that every time SAP IQ destroys a competitor’s database in a performance benchmark, an angel grows a set of wings?

BW: Yes. Unless it’s HANA that gets beat

CV: Does this apply to Edge customers?

BW: Yes.

CV: If a customer "thinks" they qualify but are not 100 % sure, then who’s the best person to speak to at SAP?

BW: The easiest way to find out is to log on to SAP Service Marketplace and see if they can find and download IQ.

CV: Will this increase the customer’s maintenance fee or will that stay as is?

BW: Maintenance fees will not change with this new functionality.

CV: Is this a limited time offering or is it safe to say that this is the new Analytics BI Suite offering going forward?

BW: This is a permanent offer.

I hope you enjoyed reading this blog and I'm super excited to bring you Part 2, which is already a Work in Progress!

Clint

1       Landscape

The project architect requires all http communication must be configure to use encryption. By default, SAP Business Objects use http instead https, which implies in certificates, SSL and Tomcat configuration.

The landscape proposed implies the BOBJ servers should be accessible by hostname, FQDN[1] and "n" aliases.

Following a simplified diagram:

Figure 1‑1 Simplified landscape diagram

1.1      Pre-requisites

1.1.1     Java Key tool from SAPJVM

Actually, the SAP Business Objects 4.1is installed using the java supported by SAP (sapjvm) which its version is 1.6.0_75 (build 6.1.066 24.55-b13). Using this version, TOMCAT will be able to handle SSL connections using TLS 1.0. If required use of TLS 1.1 or 1.2 the java component must be raised to Java 7 or higher.

The SAPJVM is located on the following path:

<drive><path choose on installation>\SAP BusinessObjects\SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 4.0\win64_x64\sapjvm\bin

Figure 1‑2 - SAPJVM version

Mostly the installations use hostname and more than one alias. If so, some specific steps must be followed and JAVA 7 must be used together SAPJVM 6.

1.1.2     Java Key tool from JAVA 7 or higher

The SAPJVM 6 does not have support for SAN[2] which it is only supported on JAVA 7 or higher. The Keytool for Java 7 is used to generate the CSR's[3] using the extension option for the Certificate. The java provided by SAP (sapjvm) shouldn't be updated and this installation must be done in a different folder.

Figure 1‑3 - Java 7 installed on another folder

1.1.3     Certified authority

As the server administrator you will be able to generate the certificate for the server but probably you aren't in charge of generate the Certificates Sign Authority. You need to send the CSR's generated to the CA[4] and receive back the certificate signed to be imported into the keystore.

2       Backup files

Before begin the procedure, make a backup for the following files. As a good practice, copy twice renaming it in accordance of the reference of the file. It is recommended to modify the files named on the meaning instead the originals.

Figure 2‑1 - Backup of server.xml and web.xml

Figure 2‑2 - Backup of axis for BPBI application

Figure 2‑3 - Backup of axis2.xml for dsws application

3       Create Keystore and CSR

3.1      Creating the Keystore

The first step is create the keystore and add to this keystore information about the certificate like keysize, alias and signaling algorithm. To do so, type the following using SAPJVM:

keytool -genkey -keyalg RSA -keysize 4096 -sigalg sha256withRSA -alias Change here for the alias -keystore Change here the path for the Keystore

Figure 3‑1 - Creating the Keystore

If required by CA, change the keysize and signaling algorithm in accordance his polices.

This procedure will generate a Keystore in the path specified and the data typed when asked. At the end, the keytool will inform all the identification for the certificate. Copy it to send to the CA.

CN=sapbobj.xxxx.yyy, OU=Type the OU, O=Type the Company, L=Type the city, ST=Type the province (2 letters), C=Type the county (2 letters)

3.2      Create the CSR

Once created the keystore, you must create the CSR and send it to the CA for generation of the signed certificate. To do so, enter on the JAVA 7 installation and type the follow:

keytool -certreq -keyalg RSA -keysize 4096 -alias Change here by the alias -file Change here by the response file that will be generated -keystore Change here by the path of the keystore -ext SAN=dns:Change by the hostname,dns: Change by the FQDN,dns: Change by the alias 1,dns: Change by the alias 2 and etc...

This procedure will generate a file named on the option -file. Send this file and the identification to the CA for generation of the signed certificate.

3.3      Import of the Signed Certificate into Keystore

The CA will generate the signed certificate and send it to be imported into Keystore. To import the certificate, type the following using SAPJVM:

keytool -importcert -keystore Change here by the path of the keystore -alias Change here by the alias  -file Change here by the file sent by CA

4       Configurations

4.1      Edit server.xml

On this example, the tomcat was configured to use the standard ports (http on 80 and https on 443) but mostly of the installations are using http on the 8080 port. Change it in accordance of the project.

Using a text editor under an account with administrator rights edit the file server.xml SSL and locate the Connector port session and make the following modifications:

Change keystoreFile and Keystorepassword as required.

Figure 4‑1 - Server.xml edited

4.2      Edit web.xml

For TOMCAT be able to redirect the requests from HTTP to HTTP, the file web must be modified as follow.

Figure 4‑2 - Web.xml

Figure 4‑3 - Modifications on WEB.xml

4.3      Edit axis2.xml for applications

The last part of this configuration is editing of the axis2.xml of the applications on Tomcat. Locate these files and edit then as follow.

..\SAP BusinessObjects\tomcat\webapps\dswsbobje\WEB-INF\conf\axis2.xml

..\SAP BusinessObjects\tomcat\webapps\BusinessProcessBI\WEB-INF\conf\axis2.xml

Figure 4‑4 - Editing axis2.xml

Copy and paste the following statements and make the necessary modifications for ports:

4.4      Final Actions

Once finished the configurations, you must restart TOMCAT to effective the configurations. This web server may take until 5 minutes to put all applications running fine. To make sure everything is ok, you can check the TOMCAT logs regularly.

Figure 4‑5 - Restart TOMCAT

5       Tests

To make sure the certificate is working properly, you must open a connection to SAP BOBJ server using HTTPS and on all alias configured. Do not forget to test it on all browsers used by the company.

Figure 5‑1 - SSL on FQDN and Google Chrome

6       About the author

Frederich Murador is a SAP Basis certified consultant (SAP HANA SUP01 and SAP Netweaver), actually working in Vancouver - Canada.

fmurador@gmail.com

6.1      Other interesting useful links

6.1.1     Backup and Sybase

http://scn.sap.com/community/ase/blog/2013/05/31/backup-challenges-on-sybase

6.1.2     DMS step-by-step

http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-64266

6.1.3     Roadmap to SAP on Exadata installation

http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-64233

[1] Full Qualified Domain Name

[2] Subject Alternative Name

[3] Certificate Sign Response

[4] Certificate Authority

What’s better than resolving an issue in your BI Platform?  Preventing it in the first place!

Predictive Support Alerts are a new support offering that will help you resolve issues before they become issues.

If you open incidents for the BI Platform product on a regular basis, you have probably already adopted the BI Platform Support Tool.  If you haven't heard of this free tool yet,I highly recommend you check it out at the link above!

In a sentence, the BI Platform Support Tool is an application that was developed by SAP Product Support to assist customers and support in analyzing their entire BI Landscape in a simple, user friendly way.

It has evolved over the last few years and the latest version allows customers to publish their landscape reports directly to SAP Product Support for analysis and Predictive Support.

How does it work?

The BI Platform Support Tool (version 2.0 and above) has a new feature that allows customers to Publishtheir Landscape Reports to SAP for Analysis. This essentially uploads their landscape data to a secure server and adds it to an internal database.   SAP Support then runs predictive analytics on the data to identify environments that may be susceptible to known issues.

Once Product Support identifies customers that may have issues, an email alert is sent out to these customers with the details of the issue and the detailed solution!

In order to make this new offering as successful as possible, we are running a short 1-month BETA program with 10-15 customers.  During this BETA, customers will work closely with Product Support engineers to step through the process and provide feedback.  The commitment is just 1-2 hours per week (max) and the benefits are endless.

Expectations during the BETA:

1. Setup a User/Email address in the BI Support Tool (required for Publishing to SAP)
2. Create 1-2 Landscape Reports using the BI Support Tool v2.0.2+ each week
3. Publish the Landscape Reports to SAP for Analysis
4. Provide feedback on the Process, Tool and Support Alerts that you receive

How to Join:

To sign-up for the BETA program, just click the below link and email the Project Lead (me) with your contact details (name, company, preferred phone #)

Sign Up for PSA BETA Program

Once we have at least 10 participants, we will kick off the BETA program.  The BETA is expected to run from Mid-March to Mid-April.

More Information:

YouTube - Demo of how to publish a landscape report to SAP using the BI Platform Support Tool (v2.0+) - Publish to SAP Feature BIST v2 0 - YouTube

BI Platform Support Tool Wiki

As Daylight Saving Time is fast approaching, we wanted to make everyone aware of SAP BI Platform's readiness.

Daylight Saving Time starts in the United States on March 13 at 2am.  DST starts in most of Europe on March 27 at 1am.

SAP Development regularly tests all products and patches for Daylight Saving Time, but we in Support make a point of performing additional testing in all of the latest Support Packages as well.  This year, I extensively tested DST scenarios within the following:

• SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 3.1, Service Pack 7
• SAP Business Intelligence Platform 4.1, Support Package 7
• SAP Business Intelligence Platform 4.2, Support Package 01 (stay tuned for BI 4.2!)

Happily, there are no new issues to report!  The Daylight Saving Time switchover in 2016 should be no different than in any recent years.

Although these will not impact most customers, here are a few DST-related Knowledge Base Articles that are worth mentioning:

KBA 1404484 - Unix and Linux envioronments should have the $TZ variable correctly set to account for the date and time of the DST time changes in your region; both Spring and Autumn.  Non-US customers should especially be aware of this, because if the $TZ variable is not set then your system may default to honoring US DST rules.  If instance runtimes suddenly appear to be one hour earlier or later starting the day the US changes their clocks for DST, this is your issue!

KBA 1986781 - If an instance's runtime falls within the one-hour period skipped over by Daylight Saving Time, its runtime will automatically be adjusted by + one hour.  Recurring instances' runtimes are permanently adjusted, and should be re-scheduled if need be.  e.g. in the US, Spring DST immediately shifts the clock from 2am>3am.  If an instance runs on Sundays at 2:30am, starting the week of DST it will now run at 3:30am.  Only instances with a scheduled start time falling within this one-hour period are affected!

KBA 1448881 - This is a carryover from 5 years ago now.  Enterprise XI 3.1 had an issue where a recurring instance might suddenly spawn hundreds of failed instances per second, leading to thousands+ instances clusttering that object's history.  The solution was to re-schedule the affected instance, and a program object could be used to clean up the unwanted failed instances.  I only list this one because, whie the issue was fixed in XI 3.1 Fix Packs 3.6 / 4.1 and Service Pack 5, there have been very few reports of similar behavior in BI 4.x.  In the extremely rare case of this issue occurring in BI 4.x, it seems to be a less severe issue.  In any version, the solution -- described within this KBA -- remains the same.

If you encounter any other issues around Daylight Saving Time, please do let us know!

Thanks and regards

-Mike

Dear Community,

We are very happy to share with you this update on What’s new in BI 4.2 videos produced by our BI User Assistance Team (formerly known as Knowledge Management Team). This is a new initiative done for the first time in BusinessObjects product release history.

Yes, we often hear that ‘A picture speaks more than a thousand words’ and a video can only mean more, right? To enhance customers’ learning experience, we decided to deliver documentation through a new channel i.e. through videos. The User Assistance team has created new feature how-to demo videos for BI 4.2 release. These videos explain the concept and demonstrate how users can easily learn new features to meet specific BI requirements.

We strongly believe that this method will certainly help our BI users consume documentation better. All these videos are hosted on SAP’s YouTube channel and referenced in the What’s New guide as well. Our plan is to continue this initiative for our future releases as well.

These videos are already made LIVE on YouTube and are made as playlist in SAP Analytics channel. Customers looking for BI 4.2 features will get these videos in a single playlist @ YouTube

Sincerely,

Sathish Rajagopal (sathish.rajagopal@sap.com) & Krishna Kiran (krishna.kiran@sap.com)

Dear BI Community,

It’s my pleasure to announce the release of Phase 5 of SAP BI Pattern Books project with two books on how to successfully move to the latest SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.2 release. The first book is on “how to upgrade from BOE XI 3.X to BI 4.2” and the second one focuses on “how to update from BI 4.x to BI 4.2”.

Key highlights of the books:

• These books were developed using system landscapes that is similar to our common install base with more than fifteen servers, thousands of objects and bunch of applications
• The best practices, recommendations, tips / tricks and including the what’s new in BI 4.2 release are highlighted throughout the sections of these books
• First time ever, we are releasing pattern books immediately after the GA of BusinessObjects software release

Here are the quick links to the SAP BI Pattern Books;

Pattern Books Home Page

Pattern Book on Upgrading from BOE XI 3.X to BI 4.2

Pattern Book on Updating from BI 4.X to BI 4.2

Please help me spread the news.

Best,

Sathish

@srajagpl

Just got a chance  to look at BI 4.2 post GA. Every new feature added in this release looks promising and it will definitely going to add advantage to Platform support teams also it will be a big relief for every administrator/Architect for platform management.

Administrator’s cockpit is one among the impressive feature I can think of. However with the current capability we may not be able to achieve all our day to day monitoring/troubleshooting/Support activities. To know more about Administrator’s cockpit you can view the video here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmRVZCXxyBE

You can see 4 different sections when you navigate to Administrator’s cockpit in BI 4.2 CMC

Servers

With the current features we can get the overall summary of the Servers status along with an ability to start the server in case if it is down.

My wishlist

It would be good if we have the ability to navigate to Server/Server groups page of the CMC itself as we may required to perform other activities such as Stopping / Disabling currently running services in few scenarios. Along with this if we have the server running pattern over a period of time (time range as in other sections), it might have been very useful as it may help us to do the downtime analysis of each individual server.

Schedules

Again this is similar to servers with over all summary of schedules with a time range.

My wishlist

Monitoring schedules is one among the key activity in BI platform as it is business critical. The typical expectation would be something like hour by hour analysis as below which will give a complete picture about the report schedules over a period of time.  This will also give us the busiest times which will again help us to fine tune the environment/Adjust the report schedule times/size the BO services accordingly etc.…

Content usage and Applications

I don’t have much expectation from Content usage and Applications sections as of now, however I appreciate comments from other as well.

Disclaimer:  I have written this blog in a view to share my expectation based on my experience and this doesn’t mean that these features will be incorporated in future releases. This blog is neither endorsed by SAP nor by my employer. Please don’t hesitate to comment on your ideas based on your experience.

I am planning to create a Idea place entry based on the response received here. Thanks for reading.

Happy Blogging…

Thanks

Mani

Another regular day at work. I log into the Customer Support System to see if there are any Customer Incidents assigned to me. I see one new Incident. One customer created the incident to clarify some confusing piece of information in the BIP Administrator Guide. Of course! This is not surprising to me. More often than not I find that customers are unable to understand a crucial step or find that some information is missing in our Admin Guide. Being a part of a Support team, it bothers me more and more to see you - our customers - struggle to understand our Product Documentation. That means our documentation essentially isn’t serving its prime purpose.

Since I know this is not the first time someone needed help understanding our documentation, I find a KBA with a solution. But then something occurred to me:

“What if we could fix our documentation by rewriting the steps from the point view of the customer and by adding screenshots and graphics?”

“Could we collaborate with Documentation team to make our Admin Guide better which as a result would reduce these types of Incidents?”

I talked to my team and found that they had similar frustrations and expressed the same interest in fixing Documentation first hand. That’s how we got working on a project to enhance our Admin Guide. The first call of action was to get the buy-in from Knowledge Management team who create the Admin Guide. I connected with Priyanka and Malavikha and presented our ideas to them. I was so happy when they were on board with us. They appreciated our involvement and we worked on a plan of how we were going to work on the issue. We had great collaboration between the Product Support and the Knowledge Management teams since the beginning of 2015!

Here’s what we did to address our problem:
1. We identified sections of the Admin guide for which the most number of how-to Incidents were created. Naturally, it seemed like a good place to start. We also looked at the most viewed Knowledge Base Articles which were also covered in the Admin Guide. If you were looking at KBAs instead of the Admin Guide for instructions that meant we can write our documentation better.
2. We then tried to test all the documented workflows in the identified sections to see if there was some incorrect or missing information.
3. We also worked with most experienced Support Engineers to re-write the instructions in documentation for the frequently asked how-to questions.
4. After validating all the workflows, we tried to reword the steps to make it clearer and more complete, added images and screenshots to support complex workflows and also linked any related videos or KBAs to the relevant sections.
5. Also, we create HTML versions of the Admin Guide. This way you can view HTML version and go directly to the chapter they need without downloading the entire 20+ MB file.

Here is an example of how the KBA with a video would appear in Admin Guide:

And when you click on the link, you will get this:

As I have also learned, Knowledge Management team is working on some exciting projects to make our documentation even better. Here Malavikha will share some of them with us.

“Working with the Product Support team to enhance the quality of documentation in the BIP Admin guide, I believe, was a much-needed first step towards helping you understand the workflows better. But, that’s not the only thing that the Knowledge Management team is working on in terms of enhancing the documentation.
Here are some of the Initiatives that my team is driving:
1. New-feature demo videos: Well, as they say ‘A picture speaks more than a thousand words’ and a video can only mean more! In order to aid you better, we decided to deliver documentation through a new channel – through videos. We have created new feature how-to demo videos for BI 4.2 release. These videos explain the concept and also demonstrate how users can complete a particular task. It will certainly help users consume documentation better. All these videos are hosted on SAP’s YouTube channel and referenced in the What’s New guide. We plan to continue this initiative for our future releases as well.
2. Error Message Improvement Initiative: Most often, we notice that our error messages go ‘Contact your system administrator’. This doesn’t help you much, as it does not really state the cause of the error or some basic actions that the user can take. Also, what if the user is the Administrator?! So we reworked some error messages in the Error Message guide – identified the cause for these errors and also the immediate actions that the users can perform by self, without actually reaching out to the administrator. This will surely help you to resolve issues faster.
3. Conducting Customer Interviews to obtain feedback on Product Documentation: We are also trying to reach out to you to obtain detailed feedback on product documentation to understand what their pain-points are, and also to hear first-hand from them about what they would like to be improved or enhanced in documentation. Simultaneously, we will collate feedback, analyze them, and work towards incorporating the feedback comments.”

We really hope that you will find our Product Documentation easier to read and understand. This way you can find the answers yourself without having to log an Incident and wait for the answer from us. Our job is nowhere near to be complete as we continuously look for ways to improve our documentation.

What can you do?
Do you have suggestions on where the Admin Guide may be improved/clarified? Please let us know. Add a comment to this blog. We value your input.

Purpose:

The purpose of this document is to up-grade SAP Business Objects Application from 4.1 SP6 to SAP Business Objects Application from 4.2

Overview:

Environment Details:

Operating system: Windows Server 2008 64 Bit

Database:Microsoft SQL Server 2012 R2

Web Application:Tomcat 7 & Tomcat 8

SAP Business Objects Tools:SAP Business Objects BI Platform for Enterprise 4.2

Installation & Configuration steps to upgrade BI4.1 SP06 to BI4.2

Pre Installation Check List:

• Backup of file-store, tomcat configuration files & Data base:

• Backup of CMS & Audit metadata
• Backup of Following Configuration Files available at Tomcat (Web Tier) & BOBJ Layer (Management Tier & Processing Tier):
  • web.xml
  • server.xml
  • BILaunchpad.properties
  • Global.properties (If you have done any changes)

  · Make a note of recurring instance available in current environment

• Pause all instance before doing any upgrade activity

Post Installation Check List:

• Installation of SAP Business Objects 4.2
• Validate your configuration with respect to below points:
• Validate your reports available in your environment
• SSO (SAP, Windows AD, LDAP, & Others like Oracle SIEBEL)
• Start all paused instances and check the status after schedule.

SAP Business Objects Platform Services 4.x SPxx PAM Documents:

1338845 - How to find Product Availability Matrix (PAM) / Supported Platforms Document for SAP BusinessObjects Products

https://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1338845

1868888 - Where to find Support Packages or Patches for SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform 3.x and 4.x? [Video]

https://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1868888

SCN Thread related to Pre-requisite:-

Link:

http://scn.sap.com/community/bi-platform/blog/2014/07/27/sap-businessobjects-xi-31bi-4x-installation-prerequisites-and-best-practices-linuxunix

http://scn.sap.com/community/bi-platform/blog/2014/05/01/sap-businessobjects-installation-pre-requisites

Software Path in SAP Market Place:- Please refer above KBA for software detail

Installation & Upgrade:-

Support Patches:-

Up gradation & Configuration Documents:

When the prerequisite system check completes successfully, click Next

On the "SAP BusinessObjects BI platform services 4.2 setup" page, click Next.

Accept the License Agreement, and click Next.

Type a password for the CMS Administrator account, and click Next

To start the installation, click Next.

Installation is in progress

Updating Repository - Installation is in progress

Post Installation Steps

Finish

New Features in SAP Business Objects 4.2 Administration Perspective:-

• BI Administration Cockpit

Relevant Systems

These enhancements were successfully implemented in the following systems:

• SAP Business Objects Platform Services 4.2

This document is relevant for:

• SAP Business Objects Administrator

Reference Material:

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence platform 4.2

http://help.sap.com/bobip

SAP BusinessObjects BI4.2 What's New L2

http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-68333

Installation, Upgrade, Deployment:

http://service.sap.com/~sapidb/012002523100015754782015E/sbo42_master_en.pdf

SAP BusinessObjects What's New Collection:

http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-60001

Updating SAP BusinessObjects BI4.0 or SAP BusinessObjects BI4.1 into SAP BusinessObjects BI4.2 requires a new License Key

http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-70095

How to Upgrade to BI4.0

http://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/display/BOBJ/How+to+Upgrade+to+BI4.0

All you need to know before upgrading to BI4.0

http://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/display/BOBJ/All+you+need+to+know+before+upgrading+to+BI4.0

SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.1 Upgrade – Overview

http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-56525

Official Product Tutorials – SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform 4.x

http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-8292

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence platform 4.1 Product Availability Matrix:

http://service.sap.com/sap/support/pam?hash=pvnr%3D67837800100900006540

Overview - Updating SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.x System to BI 4.2 Release

https://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/display/BOBJ/Overview+-+Updating+SAP+BusinessObjects+BI+4.x+System+to+BI+4.2+Release

Caching BI 4.2 SP1 Web-Tier for Platform on both Tomcat Machines

https://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/display/BOBJ/Caching+BI+4.2+SP1+Web-Tier+for+Platform+on+both+Tomcat+Machines

KBA:-

1338845 - How to find Product Availability Matrix (PAM) / Supported Platforms Document for SAP BusinessObjects Products

https://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1338845

1868888 - Where to find Support Packages or Patches for SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform 3.x and 4.x? [Video]

https://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1868888

1739722 Upgrade Management Tool - Prerequisites

https://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1739722

https://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1331062

1654423 Migrations fails or take too long when using SAP BusinessObjects Upgrade Management Tool

https://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1654423

1804414 How to increase Upgrade Management Tool timeout?

https://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1804414

1863600 - How does session management work with SAP BI Platform 4.0 web application clients?

https://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1863600

1837122 - How to increase session timeout value for BI Launchpad and CMC in BI 4.0

https://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1837122

1950573 – Is it Necessary to Split the Adaptive Job Server in BI 4.x?

https://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1950573

Note 1768713:Crystal report when exported to PDF displays in wrong font in BOE XI 3.1

https://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1768713

2144559 Maintenance/Forward Fit Strategy and Schedule for BOE XI3.1 and BI4.x

http://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/2144559

1724610 How to check the version of SAP BI 4.x installed on UNIX environment

http://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1724610

1613846 How to find which fixes are installed on BI 4.x in a Windows environment

http://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1613846

1739722 - Upgrade Management Tool - Prerequisites

http://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1739722

1904814 - Best practices for a successful migration to BI4 using the upgrade management tool

http://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1904814

2047063 - Promotion management services show "The service did not start" on adaptive processing server (APS ) "running with errors"

http://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/2047063

1602088 - Which version number corresponds to which patch / SP for SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.x ?

http://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1602088

2109790 - Error: ‘The action cannot be performed’ when scheduling Webi documents created against unx universes and data tracking is enabled

http://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/2109790

2297866 - Tomcat8 is no longer to use Permsize and MaxPermsize

https://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/2297866

2277129 - Unable to access BI Administrators' Cockpit using https in BI 4.2

https://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/2277129

2266031 - Explorer web application fails to start in Tomcat 8 after configuring for Windows AD SSO in BI 4.2

https://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/2266031

2228083 - BI 4.2 - Tomcat 8 cannot startup when Wily Introscope Agent 9.1.0.2 is configured

https://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/2228083

2112338 - List of Bundled Tomcat and JVM versions shipped with each (support pack) SP of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence 4.0/4.1/4.2

https://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/2112338

Video ( SCN recoded webinar & YouTube):

SAP BI 4.1 - Solution Expert Webinars

http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-56308

BI Upgrade: A Guided Tour of Online Resources

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWcxShmqVe0&list=PLufF7pZxICBiJqcdJv-L1hVn8ZiWh70kk

Upgrade Process: Moving from BusinessObjects XI Release 2/3.1 and BI 4.0 to BI 4.1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWNhWNsnMZI

SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.1 Sizing and Virtualization

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_TJXdfAH-Q

SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.1 Installation and Patching

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvj_riui50Q

SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.1 Sizing and Virtualization

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_TJXdfAH-Q

SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.1 Installation and Patching

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvj_riui50Q

SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.1 Upgrade and Update – Best Practices

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWNhWNsnMZI

Hi Folks! Following my initial series of Geek Tweaks on SAP Lumira today we will be seeing some Geek tweaks on our famous BI Platform. BI Platform at this form of writing is in version 4.2 currently on GA which promises lot of enhancements, improvements and new features which we have been waiting. You can read more about the new features http://scn.sap.com/community/bi-platform/blog/2016/01/11/sap-bi-42--bi-platform-new-features

Some of the tweaks explain the internals of the Platform and are for information purposes and some of them might be dangerous to try in your environment. You are responsible for performing any tweaks related to this.

“God does not make mistakes, the rest of us better take backup”

List all Internal BI Service

SAP BI Platform is built on principle of modular design and exposes its end points as Services so that other applications, clients can consume and communicate with them. Some of the internal SDK operations are also relay on web service to get their job done.

BI Platform uses the famous Apache Axis2 as its engine to process and expose the service. You can find the list of internal services used by the dswsbobje by using the following URL.

http://<host>:<port>/dswsbobje/services/listServices

This can be also used to check if the service is running or not. If this particular service has issues, SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio may not be able to communicate with BI Platform.

There are some more other services to explore from your webapps folder which is found under <BOBJ Install>\SAP BusinessObjects\tomcat\webapps

Changing the location of Data folder

The Data folder that is present in SAP BI platform acts as a cache and is also responsible for storing the session. Each node in the cluster will have separate folder in the format of hostname_SIAport. In addition to it, some of the services will also have its own folder to store their content.

The data folder should be in a High speed IO disk with less latency for high performance of the BI system. By default, it is located at the following location <BOBJ Install>\ SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 4.0\Data

You can mount a high speed storage on this location so that BOBJ can then take advantage of it. On Linux based deployment it can be done by using the mount command while in Windows it can be done with the power of mklink

mklink /J “<BOBJ Install>\ SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 4.0\Data” “<Destination>”

Finding and changing PID of BOBJ Process

BOBJ platform consists of lot of processing servers which internally spins up numerous process each having unique PID (Process Identifiers). These PID are used to identify the process and start them. You can find the same of each process in your task manager running under the service account which is used to start SIA.

All of the process always run in the same PID. That is because it is easy to operate a process when its PID is known. BOBJ stores all of the PID files in the following location

<BOBJ Install>\SAP BusinessObjects\SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 4.0\serverpids

Although changing them is not recommended, changing the PID on the process file and restarting SIA would result in the process running with the new PID.

Default Bootstrap BI Platform files

SAP BI platform has a set of default bootstrap files that are created during the install time. Those files hold configuration information and details about the deployment and the instance. The location of these configuration files is

<BOBJ Install>\SAP BusinessObjects\SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 4.0\win64_x64

_boe_<nodename>.bootstrap contains the default deployment information in XML, internal Java process configuration and values for various key that the BI Platform uses.

_boe_<nodename>.dbinfo contains the encrypted database information that is used by BOBJ to access the DB

_boe_<nodename>.keyfile contains the encrypted key that is used by BOBJ to encrypt the artefacts in DB

Tweak Advance Configuration

BOBJ is a versatile platform with ever growing features, one of the important aspects of it is the fact that it’s modular and configurable. Hidden amidst of BOBJ files are some advance configurations which can be found at

The configuration folder contains a lot of configuration information including the version of BI Platform and other XML based configuration used by each process in BI Platform.

WebI Properties

Locate and open the file webiProperties.txt document to find some rendering options that are set for WebI

Apart from this, there are quite a bit of configurations that cannot be covered in this post. Lookout for future posts on those advance configurations.

Starting the CMS in console mode

Console mode is used when the CMS is refused to start or when there are some issues with it which needs some advanced debugging. Often console is used by SAP to debug the CMS when an issue is raised to them. Using the console mode can cause irreparable data corruption or data loss.

More details on the console mode is given on SAP Note 1828536

Securing your BOBJ with FIPS 140-2

BOBJ has support for FIPS based encryption. FIPS stands for Federal Information Processing Standard which is standards that specify requirements for cryptography modules. If your company compiles with this standard, you can enable FIPS to leverage the option in BI Platform.

Simply add the switch –fips to the SIA command in SIA properties to enable fips.

FIPS mode is stricter and prevents old clients that does not follow this to connect to BI Platform. If you are using old clients this may not be an option for you.

That’s all folks in this posts, Keep lookout for more Geek tweaks and if you have any, feel free to post below in comments.

WHAT IS THE ANALYTICS VALUE MAP?–

The Value Map for Analytics helps you quickly identify the relevant SAP Enterprise Support services, tools, and expertise for a particular objective relating to your SAP Analytics product such as an implementation or upgrade.
Whether you are interested in discovering SAP Best Practices for BI Platform or setting up a BI4 Monitoring solution, you can benefit from our social collaboration platform - SAP Jam.

We can help you to build a road-map to support your whole project with documentation created from customer feedback and with forums to discuss your opinions, challenges or to post your questions to SAP experts and to interact with other customers.

SAP Analytics experts are available via SAP Jam to support you through your project.
Discover best practices, reduce effort and improve results!
It is open for Enterprise Support and PSLE customers to join.

SO WHAT TYPE OF CONTENT IS AVAILABLE?–

In the Value Map we have put together all of the relevant Empowerment offerings from the SAP Enterprise Support Academy related to BI Platform (and other analytics products). You can work directly with a Focus Adviser to plan a support roadmap of ES deliverables to help ensure your projects are safeguarded, and landscape is operating optimally.  These offerings include:

• Meet the Expert live meetings and recordings
• EGI (Expert Guided Implementation) sessions – these are live guided tutorials held over the course of 3-5 days to help you setup BI Platform managed system setup and EWA activation in Solution Manager among other topics.
• QuickIQ – short tutorials on administrative and operational tasks
• Best Practice documentation on a wide variety of topics
• We also have details about remote delivered CQC services to safeguard major events such as a new Implementation or Upgrade project. 

In conjunction with these fixed offerings (all free for Enterprise Support and PSLE customers) you also have the collaboration potential of the SAP JAM infrastructure to give us your feedback and let us know if you feel there are any knowledge gaps that exist. Based on your input we can work to create content you would like to see, when possible.
We also have weekly feed updates to bring you the latest support related news.

HOW CAN I JOIN?–

For further information on the Enterprise Support Value Map Analytics, please visit our SAP Enterprise Support Academy landing pageor register here to join now.
When registering via the link above, select “Analytics Value Map – SAP Enterprise Support” from the drop-down list and fill in your Company details and any objective you may have.

We look forward to working with you!

Here's a quick preview...

Analytics Value Map Team. 

Previously, I posted on the SCN an article on how to setup Introscope Monitoring for the BI Platform.  This article is a replacement to the previous article posted here: A complete guide to setup CA APM Introscope 9 for monitoring SAP BI Platform 4.1 on Windows [PART 1/2]

Due to changes in the new SAP Solution Manager Diagnostic Agent 7.4, there has been a period of time where it was not possible to setup Introscope monitoring for the BI Platform unless you had the full SAP Solution Manager stack in your environment.  After some research, testing, and working with various teams here at SAP, I'm happy to announce that you can once again setup Introscope monitoring for your BI landscape.

This article is applicable to those SAP BusinessObjects customers who:

• Do not have an SAP Solution Manager system
• Do not have an SAP Basis team or ABAP / Netweaver experience
• Would prefer to only implement Introscope Monitoring tools without the full SAP Solution Manager stack

 
Here is the workflow we will follow:

• Step 1:  Download the installation media from the Software Download Centre
• Step 2:  Install the Introscope Enterprise Manager
• Step 3:  Install the Diagnostic Agent on each BI node and application server node
• Step 4:  Configure each BI node and application server node using AC Tool
• Step 5:  Validate the installation/configuration is working

Step 1:  Download the installation media from the Software Download Centre

First, we need to download each piece of software from the Service Marketplace.  The files required for this configuration are part of the SAP Solution Manager files on the Software Download Center.   If your company has a Standard or Enterprise Support contract, you should have usage rights and access to download SAP Solution Manager software. If you find that your S-USER does not have access to download one of these files, open a message under component XX-SER-SWFL and request access to download the file.  If you are installing to an operating system other than Windows x64 or if you are having trouble finding the files by browsing, then use the search option to search for the file names under Support Packages and Patches and locate the version appropriate for your platform.  In the table below, you can copy the file name and paste it into the search box as it is the exact search term that should be used.  Furthermore, if you find that the downloads do not complete successfully using the links below, then instead search for the files in the Software Download Center and add them to your download basket.  Once they have been added to your download basket, you can then download them via the software SAP Download Manager.

Step 2:  Install the Introscope Enterprise Manager

SAP provides a read-only version of CA APM Introscope (RTV version) for free as part of your support contract.  This means that you can leverage the monitoring and root cause functionality provided by Introscope, without spending additional money on a full license.  Should you decide that you want to create alerts, customize dashboards, or utilize the Websphere/Weblogic power packs, then I encourage you to contact your account executive about upgrading to the SAP Extended Diagnostics package (SED).

The Introscope Enterprise Manager should be installed on a dedicated server which has 24/7 uptime.  All of the performance metrics are stored in the SmartStor database which is maintained by the Introscope Enterprise Manager.  For best performance, you should install to a dedicated hard disk with plenty of available disk space (300gb or more).  The Introscope Enterprise Manager makes frequent read/writes to this disk and works best if nothing else is reading/writing to this disk in parallel.

1. Copy the Introscope Enterprise Manager 9.5 SP6 media (WILYISEM06_0-70000324.zip), Introscope 9.5 SP6 customizations (WILYISMM06_0-70000299.zip), eula.txt, and osgiPackages.v9.5.6.0.windows to a temporary folder on the host where you will be installing the Introscope Enterprise Manager
   
   
   
   
2. Extract WILYISEM06_0-70000324.zip to a folder WILYISEM06_0-70000324 then move eula.txt and osgiPackages.v9.5.6.0.windows.zip to this folder
    
     
3. Edit the file eula.txt and change "reject" to "accept" to accept the end user license agreement
   
   
   
   
4. Edit the file ca-eula.txt and change "reject" to "accept" to accept the end user license agreement
   
   
   
   
5. Edit the file installer.properties.  If you want to change the default install location, update the property USER_INSTALL_DIR. Next, set silentInstallChosenFeatures to All
   
   
   
   
6. Double-click on the file introscope9.5.6.0windowsAMD64SAP.exe to launch the silent installer.  Wait about 2 minutes and check the install directory for failed log files.  If no failed log is generated then the install worked.  Confirm the install worked by checking your start menu
   
   
   
   
7. Next, we need to turn up the Max Java heap setting for Introscope Enterprise Manager.  Browse to your Introscope install bin directory and edit the file C:\usr\sap\ccms\apmintroscope\bin\EMService.conf.  Change the Maximum Java Heap Size to 2048
   
   
   
   
8. Next, extract the file WILYISMM06_0-70000299.zip to folder WILYISMM06_0-70000299.  Browse to folder WILYISMM06_0-70000299 then select all files and copy them to your clipboard
   
   
   
   
9. Browse to the location where you installed CA APM Introscope Enterprise Manager (by default: C:\usr\sap\ccms\apmintroscope) then paste the contents of your clipboard to this folder.  When prompted, check the option Do this for all current items and select Yes to merge the contents.
   
   
   
   
10. Next, go to Administrative Tools and restart the Introscope Enterprise Manager service
    
    
    
    
11. Copy the files SAP_BOBJ.jar and SAP_Apache_Tomcat_Basis.jar from <DRIVE>:\usr\sap\ccms\apmintroscope\sap\extra_modules to <DRIVE>:\usr\sap\ccms\apmintroscope\deploy
    
    
    
12. Open a web browser, then browse to the Introscope WebView.  For example (where wiemhostname is your Introscope Enterprise Manager hostname):  http://wiemhostname:8081/webview
      
    
13. Logon to Introscope using the default credentials.  User: Admin and Password: Admin89
    
    
    
    
14. On the Console tab, click the drop-down menu for Dashboard to choose a dashboard
        
    
15. Confirm that the BOE 4.0 dashboards are installed.  Confirm the Apache Tomcat dashboards are installed
    
    
    
    

Step 3:  Install the Diagnostic Agent on each BI node and application server node

In this step, we will install the Diagnostic Agent 7.4 on each BI node and Web Application Server node.  If the BI node and Web Application Server node are on the same host (as shown in this example), then you only need to install the Diagnostic Agent once.

1. Copy SAPCAR*.exe, the SWPM (SWPM10SP10_1-20009707.SAR) and Kernel file (51050688_6.zip) to a temporary directory on your BI server (in this example C:\media)
   
   
2. Extract the contents of 51050688_6.zip to this temporary directory.  The extracted Kernel folder will be named Krnl_7.21_WIN__IA32__IA64__x64__SP10_
   
   
   
   
   
3. Open a command prompt and browse to your temporary directory and run the command:
   
   SAPCAR_617-80000938.EXE -xvf SWPM10SP10_1-20009707.SAR
   
   
   
   
4. After the files are extracted, execute the command
   
   sapinst.exe SMD_INSTALLATION_SCENARIO=ishub
   
   
   
   
5. After the Software Provisioning Manager starts, scroll down to the bottom of available options, expand Generic Options, Diagnostics in SAP Solution Manager, then choose Install - Diagnostics Agent and click Next
   
   
6. Next, uncheck the option "Provide the path to each archive seperately" and check "Provide Path to Installation Media".  Click the Add button, then under Media Locations, click the browse button and browse to the location where you extracted the Kernel folder Krnl_7.21_WIN__IA32__IA64__x64__SP10_.  Once you have selected the Kernel folder, click Next.
   
   
   
   
   
7. On the next page, confirm that the hostname is correct and click Next.
   
   
   
   
8. By default, the agent installs to the C:\ drive.  Change the Destination Drive if you prefer the files to land on a different drive.  Click Next.
   
   
   
   
9. The installer will create 2 user accounts on the localhost for the agent service accounts.  Click Next.
   
   
   
   
   
10. Enter in strong passwords (uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, special chars etc) for each user account being created by the agent installer
    
    
11. You may receive some warnings about the Operating System Version, it is ok to continue on. Click Next then click No.
    
    
    
    
12. Next, enter a strong password to use for the new account sapadm and click Next. 
    
    
    
    
    
    
13. When prompted if we want to add SAPServiceDAA to the trusted users list, choose Yes.
    
    
    
    
14. You will be prompted to choose an Instance Number, leave this as the default of instance 98 and click Next.
    
    
    
    
15. When prompted to Choose the SLD destination, select No SLD Destination and click Next.
    
    
    
    
16. When prompted for the Connection of the Diagnostics Agent to SAP Solution Manager, choose Do not configure connection then click Next.
    
    
17. On the Unpack Archives screen, click Next.
    
    
18. On the Parameter Summary page, click Next and the install will begin.
    
    
19. Once the installation finishes, you are done installing the Solution Manager Diagnostic Agent.

Continue to part 2:  New complete tutorial for setting up Introscope 9.5 Stand-alone Monitoring for SAP BI Platform 4.x (Part 2)