Dr. Bjarne Berg COMERIT

Correctly Size Your Dashboards to Prevent Performance ProblemsWednesday, March 20, 20134:45 pm - 6:00 pm118 Dr. Bjarne Berg COMERIT

In This Session … • We will look at how to size your BI environment, by doing a step-by-step sizing effort of a dashboard project and look a five real-world sizing examples • Then we will conduct a structured walkthrough of compatible and required software components • We will end by taking a quick peek at dashboard performance options with in-memory processing from SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator and SAP HANA

What We’ll Cover … • Sizing environment for SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0 and SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards • Core components of SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards and SAP BusinessObjects BI • Compatibility Requirements • In-memory performance options • Wrap-up

SAP has provided a sizing tool for the BI environments. It is based on Flash and is actually a dashboard itself. Download it: www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/index?rid=/library/uuid/1055c550-ce45-2f10-22ad-a6050fff97f1 The Sizing Tool — Getting Started Output Area (Sizing Results) Input Areas (items and users) This tool can help you size your SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0 environments with a few key assumptions and inputs

First, you have to enter the estimated Active Concurrent Users (ACU) for the following user types: Information Consumers Business Users Expert Users The Sizing Tool — Entering Users

The tool provides online definitions of the user types and guidelines on how to determine Active Concurrent Users (ACU). This is defined as approximate 10% of the active users. The Sizing Tool — Online Help User Definitions Many dashboard users in large organizations may be classified as Information Consumers. They may not wait five minutes between clicks, but typically do little drilldown and filtering.

The next step is to make an assumption on the size of dashboards The sizing tool classifies small dashboards as having 25 rows in the result set, medium having 250, and large dashboards having 2,500 rows The Sizing Tool — Assumptions Assumptions: The tool was based on supporting two queries per dashboard and benchmarked for accessing two relational data sources — One with 6 dimensions with 77,000 entries and 400,000 line items, and one with 6 dimensions with 7,000 rows and 40,000 line items

The output of the tool is measured in SAP Application Performance Standard (SAPS). 100 SAPS is defined as 2,000 fully business processed order line items per hour. It is a measure that hardware vendors can use to decide which of their configurations can meet your performance requirements. All hardware vendors are familiar with this measure and this is what you will provide them when requesting a hardware quote. The Sizing Tool — Output

The Sizing Tool — Memory Requirements The sizing tool also provides a sizing estimate for the hardware memory required for each of the tiers. This is measured in Gigabytes

If you get stuck on the terminology used in SAP sizing and performance benchmarking, there is a link to the SAP benchmark glossary in the tool The Sizing Tool — Terminology There are also performance benchmark and installation guides available on SAP Marketplace for individual software components

The Sizing Tool — Saving Your Sizing Example Your BI and dashboard sizing effort can be saved or printed from the tool and you can have many scenarios

The Sizing Tool — Demo

Functionality vs. Performance — What Wins?

Types of Dashboards — Formatted Number Based Some dashboards may have little navigation and be number- or key performance indicator (KPI)-based, similar to SAP Crystal Reports Static information Basic graphing of key numbers KPIs

Types of Dashboards — Graphical Dashboards • Dashboards for the senior management should be graphically oriented • Consider using logos and images instead of text for this purpose • Navigation should be very simple • For senior managers, the ability to interact with the data (what-if), see performance numbers relative to plan, budgets, and prior years are critical functionalities

Types of Dashboards — Linked to Web Services • Dashboards are most useful when shared with others • Power users can create great departmental dashboards that can be shared inside smaller organizational units In this dashboard, the data is merged with Google maps and external news feeds. This makes the dashboard much more interactive and interesting, but can kill any performance.

Dashboard Objects That Can Cause Slow Performance These are dashboard objects that you need to consider carefully before employing

Excel Performance Considerations — What to Avoid • The logic you build into your Excel spreadsheet is also compiled into the Flash file when you export it • Since some “daisy-chain” functions are very time consuming, you should be careful not to add too many conditions in the data • Lookup functions and conditioning that should be avoided include: • Lookups • Mid strings (MID) • Right and left strings (RIGHT/LEFT) • Horizontal Lookups (HLOOKUP) • Vertical Lookups (VLOOKUP) • Condition • General conditioning (IF) • Count if a condition is true (COUNTIF) • Sum if a condition is true (SUMIF) Complex logic and nested logic create large SWF files and take a long time to open. Try to keep as much of the calculations and logic in the query instead of the spreadsheet.

With the BI sizing tool, there is also a sizing companion guide written by Jason DeMelo This document explains how each tool was benchmarked and the assumptions made when building the sizing tool You can download it from: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-33126 The Sizing Tool — Companion Guide Involve your basis team in the sizing effort and also make sure that the assumptions you made are realistic from a functional standpoint (i.e., how complex and intensive are your dashboards)

From a PC client perspective you need: Memory Minimum of 2.0GB memory (really want more in practice) I recommend 4.0GB (or more if you can afford it) Processor Minimum of 2.0 GHz core (more cores the better) Disk Space Min of 3.5GB free space if you only install English Min of 7.5GB free space if you install all languages Screen Size Recommended resolution size is PC Hardware Requirements for Client Side: SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0 Make sure you build dashboards on a standardized screen resolution and size so that everyone sees the same images

Real-World Examples These are real examples from companies that have been using SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0 for at least 6 months

The Different Tiers in SAP BusinessObjects BI • First we have the application tier. This includes the Web Application Services, such as the Central Management Console (CMC) and the BI Launch Pad. • SAP recommends adding a Web application server for each 500 ACUs and that at least 5GB heap memory is assigned and 900 threads are configured • Next is the intelligence, or management tier, which includes the dashboard cache service, File Repository Service (FRS), and CMS • Only the first File Repository input and output service pair (FRS) to register in the CMS is the active pair. If you add more FRSs, these are assumed to be passive backups for fault tolerance and failures. • Lastly, we have the processing tier. This include the Adaptive Job Service and the Processing Services for the various BI tools. • Each BI tool has different memory and processor requirements

SAP BusinessObjects BI is highly scalable If you have a high number of users, you can split the application, processing, and intelligence layers on separate hardware servers You can also horizontally partition the processing and intelligence layers on several servers The SAP BusinessObjects BI Scalability Tier Components for Intelligence Tier Components for Processing If you split the Web application components on multiple servers, make sure you also deploy a hardware load balancer

Dashboard Performance — Some Recommendations • You can scale the number of instances based on the Active Concurrent Users (ACUs), and SAP has made some recommendations: • The CMS can handle up to 500 ACUs per instance and you can currently scale this to eight instances (will be increased in next release). You can add more CMSs if you see over 80% utilization of the CPUs. • The dashboard cache can handle up to 400 ACUs per instance and you can add as many instances as you want (no limitations), but you are unlikely to need more than one • The dashboard processing is normally one per machine with no limitations (the server automatically spawns and manages child processes). If you need more, add more instances.

More Key Factors That Determine Dashboard Performance • Concurrent number of users during peak load times of system • Logical design of dashboards • Simple, complex, and incredibly complex • Number of records retrieved by the dashboards • Network capacity • Database speed of source data • Number of instance • This is used for spreading service loads on multiple nodes • Number of CPUs and available memory of each server

The complete components of the BI landscape consist of a variety of software Each of these components have their own requirements The Components of SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0 We will now look at each of these components and their respective size and version requirements

All server components only support 64-bit operating systems. The mobile server is currently only supported on Windows operating systems. For others, the following versions are supported: Compatibility Operating Systems: SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0 Server Side

Microsoft SQL Server Express 2008 is included with SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0, but you may also use databases fromSAP, Oracle, Sybase, IBM, and MySQL The database is used for storing CMS and the audit repository Compatibility: SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0 and Database Servers Using the SQL Server database that comes bundled with SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0 may save you a lot of money

Compatibility: SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0 and Application Servers • The application server handles the logic of BI 4.x and can run on a variety of hardware • The supported Java application servers include: Sizing the application server is based on SAP Application Performance Standard (SAPS) instead of CPU and Memory Note: WebSphere use IBM Java SDK for all operating systems and v6 is not supported for Analysis, OLAP edition

Hardware: Server-Side Requirements • From a server sizing perspective you need: • Minimum CPU • 4 x 2.0 GHz Core CPU • Minimum Memory of Server • Min of 8.0GB memory – 16GB recommended (but more based on number of users) • Minimum Disk Space • If you only install English: 11GB Windows, 13GB AIX/Solaris, and 14GB for Linux • If you install all languages: 14GB Windows, 15GB AIX/Solaris, and 16GB for Linux

The Web Portal supported by SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0 is extensive and covers all major portal servers and their latest versions Compatibility: BI 4.0 and Web Portals Note: Microsoft’s SharePoint portal product only runs on the Windows operating system

Most Windows operating systems are supported by SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.x at the client side All desktop components of SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.x are 32-bit Compatibility: BI 4.0 and Clients Mac OS X is currently notsupported except for the SAP Crystal Reports Viewer

There are various browser and Java requirements for SAP BusinessObjects BI depending on the type of operating system you are using Compatibility: BI 4.0 and Web Browsers PS: On server side, IIS is supported as Integration option in MS SharePoint V6 for Server 2003 V7 for Server 2008 V7.5 for Server 2008 R2 • The Safari browser 5.1 is supported only by the Mac OS X operating system. • Internet Explorer 8/9 standards mode is currently not supported by BI Launch Pad. • For Firefox usage, you need the Extended Support Release (ESR).

Other Software Requirements • To run the system correctly, there are several components needed on the client side • While SAP BusinessObjects Explorer requires at least Flash player 10.1, there has been some issues with large Flash files in SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards • For example, Flash v10.1 seems to be stuck in “initializing” phase when files are over 2 MB. This seems to be less of an issue for smaller files and we have seen no significant issues in version 11.

There are many ways to connect the BI tools to an underlying SAP NetWeaver BW system With SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0, the following BW versions are supported Compatibility — Connections to SAP NetWeaver BW Dashboards can also be built on BW systems on SAP HANA through a relational universe if you have applied SAP HANA service pack 3 or 4

Why In-Memory Processing? Focus Technology 1990 2013 Improvement 0.05 MIPS/$ 389.32 MIPS/$ 7796x CPU 0.02 MB/$ 97.5 MB/$ 4875x Memory 216 264 248x Addressable Memory 100 Mbps 100 Gbps 1000 x Network Speed 5 MBPS 722 MBPS 144x Disk Data Transfer Source: 1990 numbers SAP AG, 2013 numbers, Dr. Berg Source: BI Survey of 534 BI professionals, InformationWeek, Disk speed is growing slower than all other hardware components, while the need for speed is increasing

In-Memory Processing — SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator (BWA) • BWA is a tool that has been available for almost six years and is being used by hundreds of companies • It can load data in-memory from SAP and non-SAP sources and you can build dashboards on the data using standard BEx queries and BICS connections (as covered earlier)

An Example of an SAP HANA System We Installed Recently • The long-term idea with SAP HANA is to replace the databases under SAP NetWeaver BW and SAP ERP with in-memory processing databases, instead of traditional relational databases • This means much faster query response time and a smaller database SAP HANA is an appliance that can be implemented fast, is cost effective, and can super-charge the data delivery and calculations in your dashboards!

Looking Inside SAP HANA — In-Memory Computing Engine Vs. We can also move the whole database that has the source data for your dashboards to the in-memory platform of SAP HANA. This makes the system much faster! (SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards can consume data from SAP HANA right now) BusinessObjects Data Services

High-Volume User Management and Access Control • Plan for a gradual rollout to a limited number of users • Keep the numbers comparable if possible • This will allow you to predict system loads and performance issues by stipulations from real performance data • I.e., roll out to 50 users each week • Simplified versions of high-impact dashboards may be created for casual users • E.g., a dashboard with only one query and summarized data with limited navigation and passing of variables • Create a hardware contingency plan and budget accordingly Only in rare cases should you use a big-bang approach. Since user patterns are hard to predict, this may cause significant performance issues.

Where to Find More Information • SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0 Sizing Estimator • www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/index?rid=/library/uuid/1055c550-ce45-2f10-22ad-a6050fff97f1 • Evan Delodder and Ray Li, Creating Dashboards with Xcelsius: Practical Guide(SAP PRESS, 1st Edition; 2010). • David Lai and Xavier Hacking, SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.0 Cookbook(Packt Publishing, 2011). • Dashboard and Presentation Designer (Xcelsius) forum on SDN • http://forums.sdn.sap.com/forum.jspa?forumID=302 • SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards 4.x tutorials on SDN • www.sdn.sap.com/irj/boc/dashboards-elearning

7 Key Points to Take Home • Use the SAP Sizing tool for initial sizing estimates • Size your system based on concurrent users and SAPS • Use realistic data volumes, users, and dashboard complexity in your assumptions • Use the SAP system guides on the SAP Service Marketplace, but plan to operate your system at maximum 70% load for “spare capacity” • Keep the SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0 environment on a separate stack from SAP NetWeaver BW • Make sure the PCs have enough memory • Examine the “standard” PC of the users and developers; pay attention to connectivity, screen size, and resolutions, CPUs, and all software release versions to assure compatibility

Your Turn! How to contact me: Dr. Bjarne Berg bberg@comerit.com Please remember to complete your session evaluation

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Dr. Bjarne Berg COMERIT