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Interactively view report performance in #Cognos Analytics

By NICK PLOWDEN posted Mon August 28, 2017 09:20 AM

  
Enable and use Interactive Performance Assistant to view query and rendering performance on report objects in Cognos Analytics.

The Interactive Performance Assistant (IPA) feature in Cognos Analytics is designed for authors who wish to interactively view the performance of their reports. It can be used with page design by running as HTML or preview mode within the authoring mode.

To launch preview mode, enter authoring mode, go to the “Page views” dropdown from the application bar, and click on “Page preview”.

IPA data will be displayed for data container objects such as such as Lists, Crosstabs and Visualization charts.

  1. Enabling IPA:
    Within the authoring mode go to the “Run option” dropdown and select Show run options.

  2. Select the “Include performance details” checkbox and click OK. No other configuration is required.

  3. To disable this feature, uncheck the option and click OK.


IPA is specific to the current authoring session where the 'include performance detail' has been enabled. A second user will not see the IPA values when running the report that a different user has enabled IPA on, neither will a separate session of the very same user.

The Execution Time (in milliseconds) will show up beneath the report objects. Hovering over the information icon will produce a flyout to show the following information:

Rendering time: The amount of time to generate the data container objects (does not include query time)


Query time: The amount of time required to plan the query, execute and fetch the data




Image 1 - Crosstab

 



Image 2 – List

The Total Execution Time will display at the end of the report. The total execution time is the time to render logic layout of the report, excluding the device time. Hovering over the information icon will produce a flyout to show the following information.

Host: The name of the server where the report executed
Process ID: The process ID of the BIBusTKServerMain that rendered the report
Session ID: The client’s unique identifier for their Cognos session, from login to logout
Request ID: The report session’s unique identifier through the duration of the report execution
Hop Count: The number of service nodes that the request communicated with during the report execution

To get additional information on why the report object is performing the way it is, your Cognos Administrator can use the Request ID as a search parameter within the logs.

Image 3 – Total Execution time for Report
As shown in Image 1 and Image 2, two objects that use the same query will show different execution times. This is because the second object (List in Image 2) uses cached information and therefore does not have to re-execute a query.

Limitations:

Cognos Analytics fetches rows for interactively run HTML reports as they are required, not all at once. Therefore, paging to the bottom of a long report will not give an accurate representation of the runtime of the report as you would see it when scheduling. If you wish to see the actual runtime with IPA, you can set the Rows per Page for your report object to a high enough number to retrieve all rows for the object. Simply click on the object, such as a list, and click the “Show Properties” button in the top right corner of the screen. The Rows per page option is in the DATA section.

The IPA numbers show up as objects on the report so—depending on the layout of your report—you may see some format skewing in your report when this feature is being used.

The total execution time is the time to generate the logic layout output, an XML internal representation of a report output. The device time, i.e., the time to transform from the internal XML to HTML, is not included. This is because performance issues usually do not occur in the device area.

This feature is not available for other output formats, such as .xls or .pdf. It is also not available for scheduled reports. Active Reports are also not supported with IPA even though you may get performance data on certain objects when running Active Reports.









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