Skip to main content

Microstrategy Dashboard performance improvements steps

Microstrategy  Dashboard performance improvements steps:

Many times, causes of poor performance can be simplified to specific components.
To troubleshoot performance issues, users must identify these components, then make the appropriate modifications to the environment and/or to the MicroStrategy dashboard to reduce bottlenecks.

Dashboard execution stages can be represented below:


MicroStrategy Intelligence Server

When an end user makes a Document Execution Request through any client (a web browser via MicroStrategy Web, the MicroStrategy Desktop/Developer client, the MicroStrategy Mobile app, or the MicroStrategy Office client), the request is sent to the MicroStrategy Intelligence Server, which processes the request and prepares the response.

The MicroStrategy Intelligence Server will execute all children datasets on the dashboard by either generating SQL and running this against the data warehouse, or by fetching data from a cache. The Intelligence Server will then join all the dataset results into one master table, called the virtual dataset or master dataset, to store in memory. The master dataset includes the union of all attributes in the dataset report, as well as one column for each metric in the document.
After the master dataset has been assembled, the Intelligence Server will retrieve the design structure for the dashboard either by querying the metadata for the dashboard definition, or by fetching the definition from a cache. Subsequently, the Intelligence Server will then generate the appropriate response type for rendering the dashboard. For Office documents, dashboards executed in DHTML view modes, and Flash dashboards, the Intelligence Server will generate XML, and for PDF documents, the Intelligence Server will generate PDF. For Mobile dashboards, the Intelligence Server will generate a binary in addition to XML.
When the response generation is complete, the Intelligence Server will send the response to different components depending on which client the original Document Execution Request was initiated from. For requests made from a web browser via MicroStrategy Web, the MicroStrategy Mobile app, or the MicroStrategy Office client, the Intelligence Server will send the response to the MicroStrategy Web Server, the MicroStrategy Mobile Server, or the MicroStrategy Web Services Server respectively for further processing. For requests made from the MicroStrategy Desktop/Developer client, the Intelligence Server will send the response to the Desktop/Developer client directly without going through an additional server.
MicroStrategy Web Server
End users may render dashboards executed through MicroStrategy Web in DHTML view modes, Flash mode, or PDF. When the MicroStrategy Web Server receives the response from the Intelligence Server for one of these requests, it will transform the Intelligence Server response to the appropriate HTTP response suitable for displaying in the end user browser.
For dashboards executed in DHTML view modes, the Web Server will transform the Intelligence Server XML response to HTML. For Flash dashboards, the Web Server will first upload a Flash dashboard viewer component to the end user browser (called DashboardViewer.swf, by default located here on the Web Server machine: C:\Program Files (x86)\MicroStrategy\Web ASPx\swf\DashboardViewer.swf), then forward the Intelligence Server XML response to the DashboardViewer in order for the end user browser to render. For PDF documents, the Web Server will forward the Intelligence Server PDF response to the end user browser directly.
MicroStrategy Mobile and Web Services Servers
Dashboards executed through the MicroStrategy Mobile app must go through the MicroStrategy Mobile Server, and dashboards executed through the MicroStrategy Office Client must go through the MicroStrategy Web Services server.
For dashboards executed through Mobile, when the MicroStrategy Mobile Server receives the XML and binary response from the Intelligence Server, it will forward this response to the end user mobile client for further processing.
For dashboards executed through Office, when the MicroStrategy Web Services server receives the XML response from the Intelligence Server, it will forward this response to the end user Microsoft Office client for further processing.
The Performance Troubleshooting Cycle

The above chart illustrates the Performance Troubleshooting Cycle. The goal of the cycle is to improve performance by identifying which components are acting as bottlenecks, then making the appropriate modifications to these components specifically, the environment as a whole, or the dashboard itself.

Monitoring

The first step of the cycle is to quantify the performance by measuring the time spent in each of the components that are part of a Document Execution Request, as described in the preceding sections. The table below summarizes a few key modules that commonly consume the most amount of time during a dashboard execution:
MicroStrategy Component
Key Module

Intelligence Server
Query Execution
Data Preparation
XML generation
Web Server
Web processes

Network
Client
Client rendering
To measure the time spent in these components, refer to the following resources:

Intelligence Server
  • Query Execution - Reference MicroStrategy Product Documentation > System Administration Guide > Chapter 5for a complete list on how to monitor Job Execution and system usage
  • Data Preparation and XML Generation - KB30914: Overview of Profiling MicroStrategy Documents
Web Server
Client

Optimizing

After bottlenecks have been identified, certain component-level settings can be adjusted to optimize performance. However, since MicroStrategy deployments will typically rely on third-party components, several component-level settings may be outside the scope of MicroStrategy Technical Support but will nonetheless effect MicroStrategy performance. An example of this is an Intelligence Server may perform slowler on a machine with relatively fewer hardware resources (RAM, CPU speed, disk read/write speed, etc.) than a machine with more resources. As another example, an Intelligence Server may also perform slower on a machine with plentiful resources but many other processes running simultaneously in the background compared to a machine dedicated for just the Intelligence Server process. As a final example, an Intelligence Server and a Web Server may generate a document body quickly but a client browser may not be powerful enough to render this document in a short time period.
To adjust component-level settings specific to MicroStrategy, refer to the following resources:

Intelligence Server
Web Server
Client
Labels:

Comments

  1. Amber TaylorJune 7, 2021 at 2:14 AM

    Very good points you wrote here..Great stuff...I think you've made some truly interesting points.Keep up the good work. Dashboard Reporting Software

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

MicroStrategy URL API Parameters

MicroStrategy URL Structure The following table summarizes the root URL structure used for every request to MicroStrategy Web. Environment Main Application URL Administration URL J2EE http://webserver/MicroStrategy/servlet/mstrWeb http://webserver/MicroStrategy/servlet/mstrWebAdmin .NET http://webserver/MicroStrategy/asp/Main.aspx http://webserver/MicroStrategy/asp/Admin.aspx Every request sent to MicroStrategy Web calls a central controller. Parameters are appended to  Main.aspx  or  mstrWeb  (in a .NET and J2EE environment, respectively) to indicate to the controller how the request should be internally forwarded and handled. The following examples show a URL for accessing a MicroStrategy folder when the user does not have an existing session. The URL contains not only the parameters needed to connect to MicroStrategy Web, but also the parameters needed to log on and create a session. J2EE environment: <a href="http:...
2 comments
Read more

Microstrategy "Error type: Odbc error. Odbc operation attempted

 "Error type: Odbc error. Odbc operation attempted: SQLExecDirect. [HYT00:0: on SQLHANDLE] [MicroStrategy][ODBC Oracle Wire Protocol driver]Timeout expired" is shown when executing reports from Web When users are trying to execute some reports in MicroStrategy web in particular, they may receive the Error “SQL Generation Complete Index out of range” and “Timeout expired” error as shown below: Possible Causes: One possible cause is that the MicroStrategy Intelligence Server using a cached database connection that was already dropped by the RDBMS. To resolve this: Admin should delete the database connection caches and create a new DSNs in case they are sharing DSNs to connect to different databases. In addition, change the settings for the ‘Connection lifetime’ and the ‘Connection idle time out’.  Follow the steps below to perform the mentioned changes and verify the report after each step and some of the settings require i-server r...
4 comments
Read more

Microstrategy Dossiers explained

Microstrategy  Dossiers With the release of MicroStrategy 10.9, we’ve taken a leap forward in our dashboarding capabilities by simplifying the user experience, adding storytelling, and collaboration.MSTR has  evolved dashboards to the point that they are more than dashboards - they are  interactive, collaborative analytic stories . Ultimately, it was time to go beyond dashboards, both in concept and in name, and so  the've  renamed VI dashboards to  ‘ dossiers ’.  Dossiers can be created by using the new Desktop product or Workstation or simply from the Web interface which replaces Visual Insights. All the existing visual Insights dashboards will be converted to Dossiers   With MicroStrategy 10.9, there was an active focus on making it easier to build dashboards for the widest audience of end users. To achieve this, some key new capabilities were added that make it easier to author, read, interact and collaborate on dashboards ...
7 comments
Read more

mstrio – Python and R wrappers for the MicroStrategy

mstrio – Python and R wrappers for the MicroStrategy REST APIs Connecting to MicroStrategy  Create a connection to the Intelligence Server using   Connection()   and    connect()  in Python and R, respectively. Required arguments for the   Connection()  function are the URL for the MicroStrategy REST API server, MicroStrategy Intelligence Server username and password, as well as the MicroStrategy project name. By default, the   connect()  function anticipates your MicroStrategy Intelligence Server username and password. LDAP authentication is also supported. Use the optional argument    login_mode=16    in the    connect()  function for LDAP authentication.  Extract data from cubes and reports  To extract data from MicroStrategy cubes and reports, use the   get_cube()  and   get_report()  functions. Use...
8 comments
Read more

Prompt-in-prompt(Nested Prompts) in Microstrategy

Prompt-in-prompt(Nested Prompts) in  Microstrategy Nested prompts allows you to create one prompt based on the other and other bases on another, nested prompts allows us to prompt the highest level(Like year) to middle level(like Quarter, then to the low level(like Month). Here you can see how to  create a 3-level deep nested prompt that will prompt the user to select a year, then a quarter within that year, then a month within that quarter. Prompt-in-prompt is a feature in which the answer to one prompt is used to define another prompt. This feature is only implemented for element list prompts . The following procedure describes how to achieve this: Create the highest level filter. This is a filter which contains a prompt on an attribute element list. Create a filter on the attribute "Year." Click "prompt on attribute element list" and click "Next" through the rest of the screens to accept the default values. Do not set any additio...
3 comments
Read more

Microstrategy Caches explained

Microstrategy Caches Improving Response Time: Caching A  cache is a result set that is stored on a system to improve response time in future requests.  With caching, users can retrieve results from Intelligence Server rather than re-executing queries against a database. To delete all object caches for a project 1 In Developer, log into a project. You must log in with a user account that has administrative privileges. 2 From the  Administration  menu, point to  Projects , and then select  Project Configuration . The Project Configuration Editor opens. 3 Expand  Caching , expand  Auxiliary Caches , then select  Objects . To delete all configuration object caches for a server 1 Log in to the project source. 2 From the  Administration  menu in Developer, point to  Server , and then select  Purge Server Object Caches . 4 Click  Purge Now . To purge web cache follow the steps in the link ...
3 comments
Read more

MicroStrategy VLDB properties with Hive

 Recommended VLDB Properties for use of  MicroStrategy 9 with Hive 0.7x The recommended VLDB optimizations for Hive 0.7x are listed below. These values are set by default when the "Hive 0.7x" database object is used (set at  Configuration Managers > Database Instances > Database Instance > Database connection type ) Selected Default VLDB Properties for Hive 0.7x  VLDB Category  VLDB Property Setting  Value   Tables  Fallback Table Type  Permanent Table  Tables  Maximum SQL Passes Before FallBack   0 (no threshold)  Tables  Maximum Tables in FROM Clause Before FallBack  0 (no threshold)  Tables  Drop Temp Table Method  Drop after final pass   Tables  Table Creation Type  Implicit Table  Query Optimizations   Sub Query Type   Use Temporary Table, falling back to IN (SELECT COL) for cor...
Post a Comment
Read more

Update the data on an Intelligent Cube without having to republish the entire cube in MicroStrategy

Update the data on an Intelligent Cube without having to republish the entire cube in MicroStrategy MicroStrategy has introduced a feature known as, Incremental Refresh Options, which allow Intelligent Cubes to be updated based on one or more attributes, by setting up incremental refresh settings to update the Intelligent Cube with only new data. This can reduce the time and system resources necessary to update the Intelligent Cube periodically versus a full republish. For example, if a user has an Intelligent Cube that contains weekly sales data, the user may want this Intelligent Cube to be updated at the end of every week with the sales data for that week. By setting up incremental refresh settings, he can make it so that only data for one week is added to the Intelligent Cube, without affecting the existing data and without having to reload all existing data. Users can select t...
7 comments
Read more

Create an alert-based subscription in MicroStrategy Distribution Services

Create an alert-based subscription in MicroStrategy Distribution Services on Web Subscription to a report or Report Services document which will be executed when a certain conditional threshold is met based on another executing report. For example, a scheduled report executes which shows the Revenue by day for the past week. If the Revenue on any one day falls below a certain value, a subscription to another report or Report Services document can be triggered and delivered to a recipient. An alert based subscription can only be created directly on a report; however, another report or Report Services document can be delivered when the alert based subscription is triggered. Note: you need a grid report to create an alert and you cannot create if you want to create on a document with text boxes. The following example will walk through the basic steps on how to setup a subscription based on an alert like this: Follow the brief  steps bel...
2 comments
Read more

Case functions Microstrategy

Ca se functions Microstrategy Case functions return specified data in a SQL query based on the evaluation of user-defined conditions. In general, a user specifies a list of conditions and corresponding return values. Case This function evaluates multiple expressions until a condition is determined to be true, then returns a corresponding value. If all conditions are false, a default value is returned.  Case  can be used for categorizing data based on multiple conditions. This is a single-value function. Syntax Case ( Condition1 ,  ReturnValue1 ,  Condition2 , ReturnValue2 ,...,  DefaultValue ) Example Case(([Total Revenue] < 300000), 0, ([Total Revenue] < 600000), 1, 2) sum(Case (Day@DESC in (“Sat”,”Sun”), Sales, 0) {~+} Sum(Case(Category@DESC In("Books","Electronics"),Revenue,0)){~+} CaseV (case vector) CaseV  evaluates a single metric and returns different values according to the results. It can be used to perfo...
3 comments
Read more