OBIEE - OBI_METRICS_AGENT on Windows

OBI_METRICS_AGENT

I would like to firstly extend my thanks to Rittman Mead for making this freely available. It managed to fill the gap in performance analysis that I had been struggling to fill. Yes, I had started down the WLST route and was pulling my hair out.

So what did I do to get it to work for me?

So what's the setup: OBIEE 11.1.1.7 on Windows Server 2008 64.

Firstly, download the zip file containing the obi_metrics_agent from https://github.com/RittmanMead/obi-metrics-agent.

The zip file contains a python script, and being windows nothing is easy, we have to go and download and install python. Please make sure you download the correct version for your machine. I donwloaded Python 2.7 for 64Bit Windows (python-2.7.6.amd64.msi) and ran the installer and put Python into C:\Python27.

Job done....... not quite. The obi_metrics_agent needs the lxml library. Fortunately my trusty steed "Google" was at hand and kept nudging me in the right direction.

It transpires that you need to run ez_setup.py and this will download the setup tools allowing you to "easy install" other packages and any dependant packages. Download the ez_setup.py script and place it in the C:\Python27 directory.

Easy I thought and from the command line: C:\Python27\python.exe ez_setup.py and apart from a few error messages about proxy unavailable.... nothing. A few minutes of head-scratching later and I realised that none of the Servers can access the internet, so a few minutes more on the good steed "Google" grazing the plains of knowledge, I dowloaded the setuptools-3.4.4.zip file and placed it in the C:\Python27 directory. Now the ez_setup.py script command completed without error.

Now I have the easy_install.exe and can download the lxml-2.3-py2.7-win-amd64.egg file - once again make sure you get the correct version for your Python install. You will find the easy_install.exe in the Python27\scripts folder, so once again placing the egg file on the server we run c:\Python27\Scripts\easy_install.exe lxml-2.3-py2.7-win-amd64.egg. This unpacks into the C:\Python27\Lib\site-packages directory.

So, if everything has worked so far, you are nearly good to go.

I then unpacked the obi_metrics_agent.zip into the middleware home directory (on my machine D:\OBI) which created a subdirectory off called D:\OBI\obi-metrics-agent-master and here's where the main script resides.

After some faffing around, I settled on the following as appropriate for my needs, yours may be different.

C:\Python27\python.exe D:\OBI\obi-metrics-agent-master\obi-metrics-agent.py --opmnbin D:\OBI\instances\instance1\bin\opmnctl.bat --data-directory D:\OBI\obi-metrics-agent-master\data --interval 10

Now I must admit I have spent a fair amount of time going through the different options and outputs and it realy works, I'll eave it to you to judge, but thanks Rittman Mead.

I have jobs that run every couple of minutes loading the data into a database allowing us to monitor the internals against usage - amazing!