Email deilvery of reports hung up...C 8.3

[ghart]

I have a daily audit report scheduled with email delivery. Most days, everything proceeds normally with the report email arriving within seconds of execution. However, on some occasions (like today  :( ), email delivery is delayed up to 2 hours. Looking at the activity status for today's report, I see the following status:

   CNC-SDS-0408 There are email messages waiting to be sent.

Would appreciate any thoughts on what might cause this or where to look to investigate further.

[ghart]

We've had another instance of an email report delivery be stalled. "My activities" showed two activities with waiting on email status. On a hunch, we restarted the server and the latest email activity was completed virtually immediately. The other, original, activity remains stalled.

Cognos indicates it must be an environmental problem (ie not a C8 issue) but that's a little hard to believe. Even 2 brief email outages happened to impact the initial delivery attempt, email have been generally available throughout. Unless the server is not retrying email attempts (except on restart), something else is going on here.

BTW: actual report execution is fine.

Would appreciate hearing any theories or hunches on this.

[bfmooz]

Has anyone received any information about this error?  I'm starting to get the same message on a report scheduled by one of my users.  Other reports are running and emailing via the schedule just fine.  It seems to be one particular report schedule.

[Evorus]

Both,

I found by following this in the help file that it resolved our overnight e-mail scheduling issues.

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Enable Job, SMTP, and Task Queue Metrics
By default, only the queue length metric for job, task, and SMTP queue metrics is enabled. The following metrics are also available for each but are set to zero and do not appear in the user interface unless you enable them:

Time in queue high water mark
Time in queue low water mark
Time in queue
Number of queue requests
Queue length high water mark
Queue length low water mark
For more information about these metrics, see System Performance Metrics. Note that enabling these settings may affect performance.

You must have the required permissions to access IBM Cognos Administration functionality. See Secured Functions and Features.

Steps
Start IBM Cognos Connection.

In the upper-right corner, click Launch, IBM Cognos Administration.

On the Status tab, click System.

Click the arrow next to System to display the Actions menu, and then click Set Properties.

Click the Settings tab.

For the Environment category, next to Advanced settings, click the Edit link.

If it appears, select the Override the settings acquired from the parent entry check box. Otherwise, proceed to the next step.

In the Parameter column, type the following settings: enable.tide.metrics.smtpqueue, enable.tide.metrics.jobqueue, and enable.tide.metrics.taskqueue.

Beside each parameter, in the Value column, type True to enable the metric.

Click OK.

****THIS WAS THE SECTION THAT RESOLVED OUR ISSUES****

Open the c8_location/webapps/p2pd/WEB-INF/classes/iManage-metadata.xml file in a n editor.

Ensure that your editor supports saving files in UTF-8 format.

Uncomment the sections that begin with <!-- These metrics have been explicitly disabled. Please consult documentation on how to enable them. -->
(by uncomment you must remove the <!-- from the front of <!--property> and then --> from the </property--> within the section)

Save the file.

Using IBM Cognos Configuration, stop and then restart IBM Cognos 8.

For information about stopping IBM Cognos 8, see the Installation and Configuration Guide.

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Many Thanks

Evorus

[Kleber]

Hello there,

Check that your anti-virus is not intercepting these outoging emails, check that the email relay is in good status, check the size of your outgoing email to see how big it is by downloading it to disk, some email servers prohibit emails if they're bigger than certain size for example, 10 MB, and ReportNet has the bad reputation of producing large emails, but things are better now staring with 8.3, you now have Excel 2007 which seems to be a binary format plus a setting in your dispatcher configuration that can compress the attachments into a zip file if this exceeds a certain size of your choosing in megabytes. I tend to agree with Cognos in this one, this seems to be a problem with your environment.

good luck in that one.
Kleber

[mthiese]

I had the same problem.  I added the parameters and uncommented the metrics sections as mentioned above.  This did not fix the problem for me though.  It turned out that the user that was setup in Cognos Config to send emails via the scheduler, changed his password and forgot to change the password in Cognos Config as well. (Different that just renewing credentials).  I believe our IT dept updated the username / password in Cognos Configuration on the Cognos Server to be a static login so that this doesn't happen again.

[Allen Krause]

If emails begin to stall after the reports are completed go under system services and stop/start the delivery service.  You do not need to restart the environment for stalled emails.  I am having the same issue in 8.3 FP 4.  Very spuratic occurrences though.  At one time the service stalled early morning leaving over 200 reports from completing timely. After delivery was restarted within a little over an hour all emails were sent out.

the server also remained stable afterward.  Also for this issue it is 'usually' not the SMTP services either (telnet 'yourserver': 25, should connect instantly)

[christianlebe]

Hi Allen,

Any solution for your case?

[sunlight]

"CNC-SDS-0409 the email messages were sent to 1 recipients"

I tried suggestion of Evorus (Reply #3) and did stop/start the delivery service. Even though Cognos says, it has sent e-mail, I didn't receive it. Recipient list includes both corporate and private e-mails, so spam filter should not be a problem.

Do you have any idea?