Intelligently managing the BOE Server Intelligence Agent

Server Intelligence Agent (SIA) is the major new feature of the new server architecture for BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 3.1. SIA the bootstrap service that in turns starts the Central Management Server as well as monitors the health of the Central Management Server.

Before we start just some terminologies used in BOE that might be useful

1. Service - A service is a subsystem that provides a function. For example Client Auditing Proxy Service provides client auditing gateway service. The service runs within the memory space of its container (e.g., Adaptive Job Server or Adaptive Processing Server) under the Process ID (PID) of the parent container.
2. Server Server or Server Service is an OS level process hosting one or more services. For example, CMS and Adaptive Processing Server are servers. Adaptive Processing Server can host Client Auditing Proxy Service, Publishing Service, Search Service, and so on. A Server Service runs under a specific OS account and has its own PID.

In most of the cases we will be working with servers which are the physical processes when administering a BOE system. You can view the servers using the process explorer of windows.

Which servers are in progress depends on the settings in the CCM shown below:

You can also manage the servers from the CMC interface.

One important point to note is that the not all servers might be needed in your environment. For example if I am using only Crystal reports then it is a good idea to disable the other services to improve performance.

A great feature that been added is the ability to clone servers inside the cluster. This can be useful even in a single node environment for example to create multiple JobServers to give higher priority to handle batch jobs. Administrators can now create new servers in the CMC using the Clone option on the Servers menu.

For all this to work, you need to atleast get the SIA and CMS processes up. One of the key challenges I have run into is how to troubleshoot if the SIA service itself fails to start up.

Fortunately BOE provides a way to enable tracing for the SIA. This can be turned on by adding the trace option at the end of the command line. The tracing is going into default tracing folder: C:Program FilesBusiness ObjectsBusinessObjects Enterprise 12.0Loggingsia*log* and the cms*trace*log.

Since the trace log file is very detailed would recommend that we turn that off during normal production run for performance and disk space considerations.