Cognos System Monitoring

[mrcool]

Hi All,

I would like to know if there is any good and reliable method to monitor cognos environment. We are able to identify that something is wrong only when we receive an incident from the user. When we monitor system status from Cognos administration everything looks good but reports are failing and when we dig deeper we identify that one of the services(Report service or query service) is down.
Sometimes all the reports are going to pending state even when the processes are available. It again looks like one of services is down.

I would appreciate your advice.

Thanks,
mc

[AussiePete2011]

Hi there

It depends on how reactive you need to be.

We have written our own process for monitoring as follows
automated job that runs the ping command on the dispatchers every 5 minutes
automated job that looks at the bin folders for dmp and core files every 10 minutes
automated notification of specific exceptions found in the logs.

We've added all the cognos servers to a software monitor called Solarwinds for hardware and OS issues
And we use psiprobe for checking JVM heap size and memory utilisation.

BSP have a monitoring solution I believe but as it stands, it's not very straight forward to monitor Cognos due to the number of moving parts.

Hope the above helps a bit.
Cheers
AussiePete

[mrcool]

Thanks Pete..
Did you implement any automation to check services like report or query service?

[AussiePete2011]

HI there

Actually, the only way we're able to determine the types of service errors is by scanning the logs
e.g. look for specific error codes.
http://www.howtocognos.com/errors/error-codes/

We look for EXCEPTION as a term and then the error "RQP-" or "CQE-"

This is also how we determine the condition of Cognos Transformer.
I have to admit, it's not very elegant but then there's no nice way to pull this information that I'm aware of.

This might be a good starting point
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/data/library/cognos/infrastructure/cognos_specific/page510.html

Next to this keep-alive pattern there is only one other way to update the Dispatcher Cluster Information. There is an admin command which is sent by Dispatchers to CM resulting from a running state change of a particular service. This occurs when an Administrator uses Cognos Administration to start or stop a particular service on a Dispatcher. Once the admin command is sent to CM the master copy of the Dispatcher Cluster Information will become updated and propagated to other Dispatchers of the system by the keep-alive queries.

The Dispatcher Cluster Information of a specific Dispatcher can be viewed by using the following URL: http://<INTERNAL_DISPATCHER_URI>/p2plbDiag

The user accessing this URL requires the "canUseAdministrationPortal" capability

Hope this helps some
Cheers
AussiePete