Security issue to connect to sAP marketplace...

[Former Member]

HI,

I have few concerns and questions in regards to RSC component.

1. Is it absolute necessary to have Internet connection for the Managing Agent to the SAP market place to send back our BOE systems statistics for further analysis by SAP and to generate EWA Reports ?

I think its a matter of an security issue to have a connection open from our servers to an open world.

2. Is there not any way we can bypass this connection and instead we manually send these files as a means of upload on to the SAP marketplace.

3. What other way can we view the results of how our BOE system is behaving and how the associated services like RAS and CMS are behaving together ?

I saw a video where it said that RSC statistics can be viewed by INFOVIEW, so does that mean that when we deploy the RSC application it will by default create reports under a new section under INFOVIEW ?? I mean how does that work AND

What is the difference between viewing reports locally through INFOVIEW and those reports generated by SAP marketplace  by the name of EarlyWatchAlerts??

Can anyone sort out the differences in here and lay some facts around it.

I have gone through the Installation guide but still there are lot of missing parts and process on how exactly all this works together.

I am sure there would be other customers who would be on the same boat as us with regards to sending stats about our system over internet to SAP. How do we know its not gonna be used for any other reason and what the underlying code does in terms of gathering information.

If we can view the reports and root cause analysis through the reports generated by INFOVIEW locally then why do we need to send data to marketplace ?

Thanks and Regards

Abhi

[Toby_Johnston · Accepted solution]

Hi Abhi,

Here's the answers to your questions:

1. Is it absolute necessary to have Internet connection for the Managing Agent to the SAP market place to send back our BOE systems statistics for further analysis by SAP and to generate EWA Reports ?

I think its a matter of an security issue to have a connection open from our servers to an open world.

A)  No, it isn't absolutely necessary however it's important to note that the connection is made only one time per week.  The connection is not persistant and is only opened (via SSL) when the data upload happens.  With that said, you can disable the data upload.  You do however need to permit an SSL connection to the SMP during initial setup so that your landscape can be created.  This connection is disconnected as soon as your landscape has been generated.

For information on disabling the data upload see note 1603798 and disable the "ExtractUpload" task.

For detailed security information and an explanation of all the communication and protocols please review the Security and Firewall Considerations section of the RSC Operations Guide.

2. Is there not any way we can bypass this connection and instead we manually send these files as a means of upload on to the SAP marketplace.

A)  There is no way to manually send the files. 

3. What other way can we view the results of how our BOE system is behaving and how the associated services like RAS and CMS are behaving together ?

A) The RAS and CMS servers are not instrumented until BI4.0 version.  What this means is that there are no direct metrics coming from those servers.  You can however view all the metrics associated with the InfoView application, Tomcat, SDK Queries, and Operating System so you may still be able to find root cause using these metrics.  Here's a list of all the things that RSC can monitor in XI3.1

• Operating System metrics
• Java Application Servers (Tomcat, Websphere, Weblogic, Netweaver)
• Internet Information Server .NET
• BOE Repository
• BOE SDK web applications
• Webi Processing Server (Windows only)
• MDAS Server
• Connection Server (Windows only)
• Explorer Servers

The dashboards include content for:

  BOE Platform SDK  

•   Logon (Average Response Time)
•   Security Aggregation (Average Response Time
•   Services Access (Average Response Time)
•   InfoObjects Query (Average Response Time)

BOE Triage 

•   Web Applications (Average Response Time)
•   Web Applications (Responses Per Interval)
•   Web Applications (Concurrent Invocations)
•   Voyager, Webi, Crystal Reports (Average Response Time)

  BOE Voyager MDAS  

•   Active Sessions Counter
•   MDAS Requests (Average Response Time)
•   MDAS Core Server (Average Response Time)
•   OLAP DB Access (Average Response Time)
•   Java Virtual Machine (Heap used in %)
•   Process CPU Utilization

  BOE Voyager MDAS DB Access  

•   SAP BW access layer (Average Response Time)
•   SAP BW access layer (Response Per Interval)
•   SAP BW access layer (Error Counter)
•   SAP BW access layer (Active Counter)

  BOE Webi Report Server  

•   Server Requests (Average Response Time)
•   Server Requests (Reponses Per Interval)
•   Server Requests (Error Counter)
•   Number of Opened Documents
•   Virtual Memory in use (in MB)
•   Concurrent Active Operations

  BOE Webi Report Server DB Access  

•   Fetch Data from DB (Average Response Time)
•   Fetch Data from DB (Responses Per Interval)
•   SAP BW Access Layer (Average Response Time)
•   SAP BW Access Layer (Responses Per Interval)

  BOE Connection Server  

•   Server Requests (Average Response Time)
•   Server Requests (Reponses Per Interval)
•   Fetch Data from DB (Average Response Time)
•   Fetch Data from DB (Responses Per Interval)
•   SAP BW Access Layer (Average Response Time)
•   SAP BW Access Layer (Responses Per Interval)

  Crystal Reports Web Application  

•   Crystal Web Application (ART, Responses Per Interval, Stall Counter)
•   CR SDK (ART, Responses Per Interval, Stall Counter)
•   Corba Client (ART, Responses Per Interval, Stall Counter)
•   Explorer TRex Overview  
•   TRexCallScript callScript (ART, Invocations Per Interval)
•   TRexCallScript searchTable (ART, Invocations Per Interval)
• TRexCallScript showXmlMetaData (ART, Invocations Per Interval)

4.  I saw a video where it said that RSC statistics can be viewed by INFOVIEW, so does that mean that when we deploy the RSC application it will by default create reports under a new section under INFOVIEW ??

A)  No, data is analyzed via the Wily Introscope Workstation or WebView clients (investigator tool and dashboards (see above)

5)  I mean how does that work AND What is the difference between viewing reports locally through INFOVIEW and those reports generated by SAP marketplace  by the name of EarlyWatchAlerts??

A)  EarlyWatch Alert reports are generated by SAP and are available as PDF files in your SMP service inbox.  There is no relationship to this and reports viewed inside InfoView. 

6)  I have gone through the Installation guide but still there are lot of missing parts and process on how exactly all this works together.

A)  Refer to the operations guide for more details about the product functionality itself.

7)  I am sure there would be other customers who would be on the same boat as us with regards to sending stats about our system over internet to SAP. How do we know its not gonna be used for any other reason and what the underlying code does in terms of gathering information.

A)  Again please refer to the Operations Guide security section and if you have further questions feel free to post again.

Sincerely,

Toby Johnston

SAP America, Inc

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Tony,

Really appreciate your feedback on the queries that I had posted.

Now the major bottleneck for me has come down to usage of the tool. We thought this tool will enable us to have a thorough diagnostics over RAS and CMS.

We use DHTML viewer over a webseries. So No use of INFOVIEW or Crystal processing server / job server etc.

Reports are being viewed on an ad-hoc basis and there is no scheduling going on for any of our 1000+ reports.

We were running few test to see what our current clustered BOE environment behaves like and to what capacity.

So far from out test we have seen some real bad performance from our RAS service.

We are trying to narrow down on the whats causing the RAS to perform below its normal operartional load.

Hence SAP agents advised us to use this RSC tool to get an overview of the issue / crises.

I am really out of solutions in terms of on how to guage the performance and bottlenecks. If we cannot do with RSC at the moment then what is the other way to do it ?

any ideas will be much appreciated.

Thanks and regards

Abhi

[Toby_Johnston · Accepted solution]

Hi Abhi,

Can you clarify how are you viewing the reports?  Did you mean via Web Services or is it through some sdk application?

More importantly, have you identified whether bottleneck is truely RAS, the application server, or the Operating System?  Or is it a combination of these?  If the problem is with the OS resources or application server then RSC would still be helpful.

If the bottleneck is RAS then some diagnosis can be accomplished via a number of verbose RAS traces.  In addition, there are quite a few configuration tweaks available for RAS that can help to improve to performance (cpu affinity, crpe configurations, crqe configurations, sizing considerations etc) although this is a very advanced topic and will require some help from SAP support / development / consulting.

Are your end users modifying reports on the fly?  There is very little caching happening in the RAS scenario hence high loads of report refreshing can generate a heavy foot print.  Have you considered using the page server for cases where no modification is necessary? 

Do you have some sort of load testing script that you can use to benchmark changes to the RAS configuration?

Do you have a support message open for this topic?

Regards,

Toby

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Toby,

Can you clarify how are you viewing the reports?  Did you mean via Web Services or is it through some sdk application?

The webseries hosts the JavaSDK that integrates to BOE (CMS and RAS) and then once the report is available then it is sent back to WebClient to view the reports through the browser.

Webseries Web Application acts as the translation layer between the end
user's web browser and BusinessObjects Enterprise Software Development Kit
(SDK) interface running on a web application server.

If the problem is with the OS resources or application server then RSC would still be helpful ?

We have done quite a no. of test and found that the OS and CPU utilization is absolutely within 30% of the complete usage. So I do not see any issues from OS but firmly believe its the RAS or the way RAS handles requests.

Whenever we have enabled tracing on our RAS service the RAS just seems to crash after 30-40 mins into operation. Hence we refrain from that path.

What other VERBOSE TRACE are you referring to ???

I have attached a file to this post on the TEST we have done so far with CPU affinity and without CPU affinity, Please have a look at it and advise.

Are your end users modifying reports on the fly?

NO user are not modifying reports on the fly at any time. There is no functionality built in the browser for them to modify. Its only Crystal reports that are being populated.

Do you have some sort of load testing script that you can use to benchmark changes to the RAS configuration?

Yes we do have a load testing script that interrogates the RAS and CMS Metrics to and take a snapshots every 5 secs and pulls back the results on No. of Open Documents / Open documents since startup / Concurrent connections etc etc. We use Load Runner to do our load test, so gradually ramping up our user base and no. of reports

Do you have a support message open for this topic?

yes I had opened couple of support messages for this topic but then SAP consultants advised that they will not be able to help me and was later on transferred to BI_JAVA_DEV department. So awaiting a response from them. This has been going on for over 2 months and we still havent got any good feedback from anyone.

Basically it was SAP support team who advised us that we install RSC to track our RAS / CMS / etc services and look for data or information populated by RSC.

Hope you will be able to tell us whats actually happening.

Thanks and Regards

Abhi.

(Calling for a long shot - but can we have an conference call with yourself and my other team members in regards to RSC).

[Toby_Johnston · Accepted solution]

Dear Abhi,

If your not modifying reports then the solution is to avoid using RAS altogether. 

Instead of getting your report source using the RASReportFactory you should be using the PSReportFactory.  This will make it such that the reports will be processed and cached using the Crystal Reports Processing Server and Crystal Reports Cache Server instead of the Report Application Server.  The Crystal Reports Processing Server is meant to handle large volumes of load and the Crystal Reports Cache Server will cache the EPF pages (report pages).  You will see a huge performance increase by following best practices and running your Crystal Reports via the Page Server (CR Processing Server).  RAS should only be used when ad-hoc report modification is required.

In addition, RSC will provide some monitoring capabilities if you use this method (see my previous post).

Here's a code example from the Viewers Java SDK Developer Guide and the Viewers Java SDK API:

1)  Retrieve the IEnterpriseSession object that you previously stored in the user’s session.
   
IEnterpriseSession enterpriseSession = (IEnterpriseSession) session.getAttribute("enterpriseSession");

2)  Use the IEnterpriseSession object’s getService method to get an IReportAppFactory object.

IReportSourceFactory reportFactory = (IReportSourceFactory) enterpriseSession.getService ("", "PSReportFactory");

3) Call the IReportAppFactory object’s openReportSource method, passing it the report ID. This will return a report source object:

Object reportSource = reportFactory.openReportSource(reportID, request.getLocale());

4) Once you have obtained a report source, you should cache the report source in the session variable. See Cache the report source for details. To cache the report source in the session variable:

session.setAttribute("reportSource", reportSource);

A phone call about RSC is possible, sometime this week.  You can reach me at toby.johnston @ sap.com

Sincerely,

Toby Johnston

SAP America, Inc.

[Former Member]

Hi toby,

Any updates from your end for the above mentioned issue ?

Thanks

Abhi