Hyperion Infrastructure Worst Practices, Part 1: Planning and Essbase

You’ve probably read your fair share of “best practices” guides for maintaining Hyperion applications. But what about “worst practices”— the most common culprits of slowdowns and even crashes?

Below are six infrastructure mistakes we frequently see organizations make with their Planning and Essbase applications and easy ways to avoid them.

Using HsGetValue too often

There’s nothing wrong with using HsGetValue to retrieve data. However, this function should be used sparingly and shouldn’t be the main way you retrieve data from a Smart View spreadsheet. Each time you use the HsGetValue and you have cells with no data, it writes an error to your Essbase log. Each empty cell creates three lines of data, which could potentially cause you to fill up your Essbase log and corrupt your drive.

Logging in as the admin user during busy times

There’s a reason why admins don’t complete tasks like performance tuning during busy hours. Users might log in with an admin role because they need full permissions, but what they don’t realize is Essbase doesn’t apply filters for the admin users. Without a filter applied, Essbase will add significantly more data, and doing this during busy times will cause freezing for other users.

If a user needs full permissions within the Planning app, they should be made a “hype admin” user.

Lack of performance tuning

In Hyperion Planning, most of your performance tuning involves your database connections. The default max connections to Essbase or the database is 10, which can be a problem when you have more than 20 users trying to pull a lot of data at one time. You’ll end up with users trying to click through web forms and having to wait.

Failing to check the logs

Your logs will be full of a lot of meaningless information, like people typing in their password incorrectly. But logs also contain meaningful information, like calculation times so you can see if they’re getting better or worse. Your logs might even reveal warning signs that you need to increase your connections or your max size. Checking the logs is a good way to find a problem before it becomes catastrophic, i.e. crashing during busy times.

Failing to repair Essbase.cfg

In almost every 11.1.2 version, there’s a flaw in the default Essbase config file that people frequently forget to fix or don’t even realize is there. In the config file, the quotes aren’t closed. This causes Essbase to assume the entire cfg file after the comment is merely a comment and doesn’t apply to anything.

The fix is simple:

1) Navigate to ‘D:\Oracle\Middleware\user_projects\epmsystem2\EssbaseServer\essbaseserver1\bin’

2) Right-click ‘essbase.cfg’, click ‘Edit’

3) Locate the following section:

4) Add closing quotes in the line in bold, as below:

5) Navigate ‘File > Exit’

6) Click ‘Yes’ to save changes

Not archiving your logs

Your logs can get really big and slow down your operating system as well as your Hyperion product. About once a month, you should zip up all your logs and save them for historical purposes. This proactive task will ensure your operating system and applications continue to perform properly.

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