Hyperion Essbase: Setup for automatically disconnecting users

Sometimes I post about things for your toolbox, and other times I post about investigating your own setup; and sometimes I post something from both columns like tonight!  Do you know how long users can be connected to your Essbase server?  If you read the MOS article "Specify when Users are Automatically Disconnected from an Essbase Server" from note 1054448.1 you will AND you will learn how to tell when running with Shared Services too!

Weekend Learning: Backing up and recovering Hyperion Planning applications

Tonight we have our first Weekend Learning of the year, and it is a pretty good one if you have Hyperion Planning in your environment from My Oracle Support article "How to Backup And Recover a Hyperion Planning Application" via document ID 1195635.1 and while I will be glad I had this at hand I really hope I never need to use it.  :}

Hyperion EPM: Reporting And Analysis Framework Service not starting completely

If your Search Service in Hyperion EPM is not working, start with MOS document "EPM Reporting And Analysis Framework Service Does Not Start Completely" with note ID 1626173.1 to find out how you can diagnose and resolve this problem by removing data from what appears to be an interim type of table!

Weekend Learning: Oracle Hyperion Planning - Information Center

Make sure you brush up on Hyperion with "Information Center: Oracle Hyperion Planning" from MOS via note ID 1349181.2 and add this to your favorites in MOS as well as adding some more to your toolbox of skills this weekend!

Hyperion: Analytic Provider Services does not start post Financial Close Management installation

Due to an unpublished bug, document "After Installing Financial Close Management (FCM) Analytic Provider Services (APS) Will Not Start." from My Oracle Support note ID 2032952.1 gives us a workaround based in WebLogic administrative setup on FCM 11.1.2.4.000 and later versions!

Hyperion Planning: EPMA Dimension Server does not start using RAC

If you have Hyperion in your environment, how much do you know about Planning?  The EPMA Dimension server?  How about where some of the configuration files are you can run?  Learn about all of them by reading My Oracle Support note "EPMA Dimension Server Not Starting When Oracle RAC is Used for Database" via article ID 1672160.1 to add to your toolbox!

Hyperion Planning: Managed Server produces core dump after crash

Tonight check out document "Planning Managed Server Crashes and Creates Core Dump." from My Oracle Support document ID 2002962.1 to see what parameter you need to change in which .sh file in order to have this stop happening!

Hyperion: Calc Manager is displaying dialog while running ruleset

While I do not focus on Hyperion a whole lot on the blog, tonight I want to share with you article "Calc Manager Run Time Prompt Dialog Displays When Running A Ruleset" on My Oracle Support found via document ID 2006615.1 when there are multiple business rules and "Merge Variables" enabled.

HFM data sync gets stuck on 11.1.2.2

Were you aware that on 11.1.2.2 that "Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) Data Sync is Stuck" from My Oracle Support note ID 1985527.1 can be an issue due to Internet Explorer/Apache timeout settings?  It is true!  Find out what settings can resolve this timeout issue for you inside the MOS article!

Hyperion: Essbase cannot connect to provider with error 404

Tonight the My Oracle Support article "Error "Cannot connect to the provider, Make sure it is running to the specified host/port, error 404"" by way of note ID 1966920.1 shows the result of misconfiguring the Essbase properties file!  Check out the article to learn which "service.olap.dataQuery.grid" property can cause this issue!

Hyperion FDM Run-Time/error 91 resolutions

Why is My Oracle Support note "Financial Data Quality Management (FDM) Error "Run-Time error '91': Object Variable or With Block Variable Not Set"" found via document ID 1436909.1 so important to read?  Besides having more than 10 ways to address this type of error depending on your version and scenario?  Well apart from local user permissions causing the issues, you can also encounter this when service account passwords get changed.  Looking to rotate your passwords according to your policy?  Then you might want to learn about this issue beforehand!

Hyperion: Level 0 Members of alternate hierarchy cannot be selected

Were you aware that on Hyperion Planning 11.1.2.1 the Level 0 Members of the alternate hierarchy cannot be accessed with SmartView via Member Selection?  Visit MOS note "Unable To Access Level 0 Members Of Alternate Hierarchy Through Member Selection Using Smart View" via document ID 1625343.1 to find out why this is expected, and what the resolution will be for it.

Hyperion, SmartView, Excel & HsAddin

Ever have users report the following error message in Excel while using SmartView?

Run-time error '53':

File not found: HsAddin

Me neither!  Luckily, I went to the trusty My Oracle Support portal and found several notes which looked to be of assistance:

Connecting to Essbase Through Smart View in Excel 2007 Crashes Excel- Note ID 824533.1
SmartView Shows as Custom Toolbar Instead of Hyperion Menu - Note ID 814257.1
Smart View Error "Run-Time Error ''53'': File not Found: HsAddin" when You Click the SmartView Toolbar - Note ID 875795.1

We followed the directions in the last note, but even though we did not see SmartView in the list of disabled items, HsAddin.dll was there in the list and after being Enabled the end user was able to refresh SmartView again without issue!

Weekend Learning: Troubleshooting Essbase Agent when hanging

Did you know there are some step by step instructions for how to troubleshoot the Essbase Agent when it is hanging?  The note "Troubleshooting Essbase Agent Hangs on UNIX Systems" on My Oracle Support via document ID 1107095.1 gives you the steps using the pstack and netstat commands!  On top of it all, they give you the other information needed to open an SR when you encounter this issue which may clue you in on the application log files you need to be monitoring in the future.

Office 365: EBS and Hyperion

Is your business thinking about migrating to the Office 365 solution?  Do you know what that means for either the EBS or Hyperion applications?  I found out the answer to that today by reading these My Oracle Support documents:

Is The Workflow Notification Mailer Compatible With Microsoft Office 365 Cloud Base Mailer Servers - Note ID 1914579.1
Oracle Hyperion Smart View Support for Office 365 - Note ID 1581197.1

Hyperion Essbase application and server log files

While I focus on EBS and Oracle DB technology, our profile has grown to include Hyperion products so I thought maybe other support individuals would be interested in being able to find Hyperion Essbase application and server log files.  Bookmark My Oracle Support article "Locate Essbase Log Files" from document ID 1287286.1 to access the application and server log files for Hyperion Essbase from version 7.1.x to 11.1.2 so you can start proactively viewing the logs for trends or errors being thrown.

Weekend Learning: EAS sign on for multiple Shared Services

I may have mentioned recently that we help administer Hyperion products in addition to our main EBS application, and for those of you out there in similar situations I want to share this post by John Goodwin explaining how he was able to utilize the sign in information for a standalone EAS over to multiple Shared Services instances.  Reading through this it may seem complicated, but taking a step back it is fairly straight-forward and elegant in the solution!  I learned a bit more from this one, that I did not expect to get out of the article, so I am glad that I found the article!

FYI: Oracle Hyperion Essbase 64 Bit Information

Are you thinking about installing Oracle Hyperion Essbase?  Maybe thinking about upgrading your platform to a 64-bit OS client?  Then you should visit the article "Oracle Hyperion Essbase and 64 Bit Master Note" in My Oracle Support note 1090635.1 to get information on APIs, ODBC drivers, and SmartView issues with an eye towards a 64-bit OS client.

Hyperion: Planning PSU application breaks Financial Reporting Studio

Our team had applied a Hyperion Planning PSU in DEV to try and resolve a report issue, but they reported that they started receiving an error in Financial Reporting Studio starting with "HARSnapin Initialize() Error -2147467259 - ; nested exception is: java.rmi.UnmarshalException: error unmarshalling return" when they tried to open any report.  The key here was the PSU that was deployed, as My Oracle Support note 1518423.1 was applied to "refresh" Financial Reporting Studio but if there wasn't a new PSU deployed note 1311069.1 could have applied where a file was corrupted on the server that needed replacing.

Your Oracle DB not playing nice with Hyperion products

When the Oracle database archiver log files fills up the /flash disk volume, it has the result of halting the rest of the Hyperion suite of products (in this environment we have FDM, HFM, Planning, Shared Services, WorkSpace).  Once the archiver logs were emptied and /flash had available space, everything in Hyperion land started proceeding as if nothing ever happened.  Except one oddity.  We were able to validate our WorkSpace nodes individually without encountering any issues, yet when we went through the hardware load balancer VIP we would receive this error message:

The startup document specified does not exist in the repository.  Select a new startup document on the General preferences tab.  com.hyperion.tools.cds.util.HSRpcParseException: The response from the server contained an unexpected content type.

Further troubleshooting puzzled us as we found that this error would occur only when the second node was in the VIP, even though we could hit that node directly without any issues.  We restarted all of the services that we could think of which would resolve this, even restarting the WorkSpace servers themselves, to no effect.  Opening an SR with Oracle, we were asked to remove the offending node from the software load balancing by going into the Agent configuration yet even this had no positive results.  We ended up having to reboot the entire Hyperion environment, with no other changes being made, to restore service.

This makes me believe that there were some persistent connections opened which held either sessions or ports so that once the issue with /flash was resolved some part of Hyperion was not able to communicate back to the rest of the system appropriately.  Next time, I'll gather some additional information to try and correlate so we don't have to bounce the entire ecosystem.