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

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 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 document/dashboard applying selections as filters or slices

Applying selections as filters or slices In a Microstrategy Document the selections a user makes in a selector can either filter or slice the data in the target: Filtering means that the data for the current selection is calculated only when it is requested by the user. The selections are used to filter the underlying dataset before the metric values are aggregated at the level of the Grid/Graph that is displayed in the document. If the source attribute is not included in the Grid/Graph, the metric values from all the selected elements are aggregated and shown at the level specified in the Grid/Graph. All metric condition selectors (which filter metric values or ranks) and selectors that target other selectors filter data by default. You cannot change them to slicing selectors. Slicing means that the data for each available item in the selector is calculated in advance when the document is first displayed. Selections made while ...
2 comments
Read more

Custom formatting Microstrategy metric format into 1M 2M etc

Custom formatting metric values of 1,100,000 into a 1.1 million 1.1M type format  In addition to the the pre-defined options for metric formatting, MicroStrategy supports custom formatting. The MicroStrategy Tutorial project is used to explain how users can customize numbers from "1,000,000" to a "1.00" format. Consider a report containing row data values greater than a million, as illustrated below: To format these metric values to use a decimal (i.e., 1.1) instead of showing all the numerals, right-click on the metric (' Revenue ' , for this example) and select  Formatting > Revenue Values , as shown below: Select " Custom " as a category in the Number tab and enter ' 0,,.## ' (without quotation marks), as shown below: Confirm that the format applied properly:
2 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

Email Subscription in Microstrategy

Create Email Subscription in Microstrategy Creates an email subscription. Do not include any leading or trailing spaces in the ANSWER parameters. This causes a SQL error and prevents the command from executing. Ex: CREATE EMAILSUBSCRIPTION "New Multi Users" FOR OWNER "administrator" SCHEDULE "Books Closed" CONTACTGROUP "TEST"  CONTENT "Electronics Revenue by Region" IN FOLDER "\Public Objects\REPORTS\SUBJECT Areas\Sales and Profitability Analysis" IN PROJECT "MicroStrategy Tutorial" DELIVERYFORMAT HTML  EXPIRATIONDATE NEVER EXPRIED FILENAME "file_name"   SUBJECT  "Test REPORT" MESSAGE "Please Test"; CREATE EMAILSUBSCRIPTION [ subscription_name ] [FOR OWNER login_name ] SCHEDULE schedule_name  (ADDRESS address_name | USER user_name  | CONTACT contact_name [ADDRESS contact_ address_name ] | CONTACTGROUP contact_group_name ) CONTENT ( report_or_document_name IN FOLDER   loc...
1 comment
Read more

Fiscal Week, Fiscal Month, Fiscal Quarter and Fiscal Year calculations in Microstrategy

Fiscal Week, Fiscal Month, Fiscal Quarter and Fiscal Year calculations in Microstrategy FiscalWeek Returns the numeric position of a week within a fiscal year, for a given  input date. This function is useful in financial reporting when the start of the fiscal year is different than the start of the calendar year. Syntax FiscalWeek< firstWeekDay ,  firstMonth >( Date / Time ) Where: • Date / Time  is the input date or timestamp. • firstWeekDay  (default value is 1) is a parameter that determines which day of the week is considered as the first day of the week. You can type an integer value from 1 to 7, with 1 representing Sunday, 2 representing Monday, and so on until 7 representing Saturday. • firstMonth  (default value is 1) is a parameter that determines which month is considered as the start of the fiscal year. You can type an integer value from 1 to 12, with 1 representing January, 2 representing February, and so on until ...
1 comment
Read more

Configure Connection Mapping in Microstrategy

Configure Connection Mapping in Microstrategy The following steps demonstrate the second scenario where two different data warehouses are used within the same project: Create two different database connections -                                                                                        One that points to the data warehouse for the European users                                                                 and the other that points to the data warehouse for USA users as shown below: Select Europe as the default database connection for the database Instance as seen below: Go to P...
Post a Comment
Read more

Microstrategy Authentication Using the URL API

Microstrategy Authentication Using the URL API Users have to be authenticated before accessing functionality in MicroStrategy Web. Using the URL API, there are three ways for MicroStrategy Web to obtain the information needed to authenticate a user. Opening the login page to gather user for credentials    Bypassing the login page by providing credentials in the URL    Bypassing the login page by providing the session state in the URL A detailed explanation of each method for obtaining the authentication information is provided below. Opening the login page to gather user for credentials If the URL attempts to access a MicroStrategy Web page that requires login and no credentials or session state are provided in the URL, the user is redirected to the login page. If login is successful, the user is redirected to the specified page.   The sample URL shown below executes a report without providing authenticating information. Since the Repo...
Post a Comment
Read more