6 Managing Report Delivery Servers

This chapter describes report delivery server administration in Oracle Fusion Applications.

This chapter contains the following topics:

• Introduction to Managing Report Delivery Servers

• Navigating to the Oracle BI Publisher Administration Page

• Configuring Report Delivery Servers

• Understanding the Report and Delivery Processors

• Managing Report Processing and Delivery Server Load

• Scaling Out Report Processors

• Diagnosing Report Processing Issues

• Configuring System Properties for Reporting

6.1 Introduction to Managing Report Delivery Servers

Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher is the report generation and delivery engine for Oracle Fusion Applications. Oracle BI Publisher receives report requests from Oracle Fusion Applications in the following ways:

• Through Oracle Enterprise Scheduler

• Through the Reports and Analytics pane

• From an application page

Requests submitted through Oracle Enterprise Scheduler are processed by the Oracle BI Publisher scheduler. Requests submitted through the Reports and Analytics pane can be either real-time online requests or scheduled requests. Requests submitted through an application may invoke Oracle Enterprise Scheduler or may return report request results directly back to the application page.

After installing Oracle Fusion Applications, Oracle BI Publisher is configured to accept requests from Oracle Fusion Applications. However, before you can deliver report documents to their destinations you must define the delivery servers in Oracle BI Publisher. Use the Oracle BI Publisher Administration page to define your delivery servers.

Once set up, you can then further configure the number of report processor and delivery threads to best handle your processing and delivery requirements. In addition, you can configure report properties for the system or at the report level to tune performance of your reports. To diagnose report processing issues, BI Publisher provides a set of scheduler diagnostics.

6.2 Navigating to the Oracle BI Publisher Administration Page

Use the Oracle BI Publisher Administration page to:

• Configure delivery servers

• Manage report and delivery processors

• View scheduler diagnostics

• Set system properties and report runtime configuration properties

Note:

You must be assigned the BIAdministrator role to access the BI Publisher Administration page.

To navigate to the Oracle BI Publisher Administration page:

• From the Oracle Fusion Applications Navigator, under Tools, click Reports and Analytics. In the Reports and Analytics pane, click Catalog to display the Oracle Business Intelligence presentation catalog page. From here, click Administration and then click Manage BI Publisher.

  Alternatively, log in to Oracle Business Intelligence directly (example: http://example.com:port/analytics). Click Administration and then click Manage BI Publisher.

Figure 6-1 shows the BI Publisher Administration page:

Figure 6-1 BI Publisher Administration Page

6.3 Configuring Report Delivery Servers

To configure delivery servers:

1. From the BI Publisher Administration page, click Delivery Configuration.

2. Enter values in the Delivery Configuration Options tab to set general properties for email deliveries and notifications. Figure 6-2 shows the Delivery Configuration Options tab:

   Figure 6-2 Delivery Configuration Options Tab

   
   

   For more information about this tab see "Setting Delivery Configuration Options" in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Administrator's Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher (Oracle Fusion Applications Edition).

3. To configure a delivery server, click the appropriate tab.

The following table lists the report delivery channels supported by Oracle BI Publisher. See the corresponding section in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Administrator's Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher (Oracle Fusion Applications Edition) for configuration information.

Delivery Type	Section
Printer and Fax	Adding a Printer or Fax Server
E-mail	Adding an E-mail Server
WebDAV	Adding a WebDAV Server
HTTP	Adding an HTTP Server
FTP	Adding an FTP Server

Note that printing is supported through Internet Printing Protocol (IPP). If Oracle BI Publisher is operating in a UNIX environment, you must set up the Common Unix Printing Service (CUPS) and then define your CUPS server to Oracle BI Publisher. For a Windows environment, you must set up Windows Print Server for IPP. For information on setting up CUPS and Windows IPP, see "Setting Up Print Servers" in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Administrator's Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher (Oracle Fusion Applications Edition).

6.4 Understanding the Report and Delivery Processors

When Oracle Enterprise Scheduler initiates a job, it is picked up by the BI Publisher scheduler queue. The processors perform as follows:

• Job Processor - listens for requests from the scheduler queue. When the job information is received, the job processor executes the data model (and splits the data for bursting jobs), stores the data in the shared temporary folder, and sends the report metadata to the report queue.

• Report Processor - listens for requests from the report queue. When the report information is received, the report processor generates the report documents, stores it in the shared temporary folder and puts the delivery information in the delivery queue.

• Delivery processors - each delivery processor listens to the delivery queue and handles the delivery of reports for its channel. The delivery processors are:

  • Email Processor

  • File Processor

  • FTP Processor

  • Print Processor

  • WebDAV Processor

  • Fax Processor

You can configure the number of threads dedicated to each processor.

6.5 Managing Report Processing and Delivery Server Load

Manage the processors in the BI Publisher Scheduler Configuration page. By default, each processor is enabled and the thread count for each is set to five. For each managed server that is running in the BI cluster, a table for that instance's processors will display. Use the table to enable or disable processors for the instance and configure the thread counts.

To configure processor threads:

1. From the BI Publisher Administration page, click Scheduler Configuration.

2. On the Scheduler Configuration page scroll to the Cluster Instances region.

   Figure 6-3 shows the Oracle BI Publisher Scheduler Configuration page, highlighting the JMS Configuration and Cluster Instances regions:

   Figure 6-3 BI Publisher Scheduler Configuration Page

   
   

3. Enter the Number Threads value in the processor configuration table.

   Note that all processors will automatically be set to use the number of threads defined in the Threads Per Processor value of the JMS Configuration region of the page. Enter a value in the Number Threads column to change the value from this default.

6.6 Scaling Out Report Processors

To add managed servers to enable more report and delivery processors to handle your reporting throughput see the "Scaling Out the Oracle Business Intelligence Domain" chapter in the Oracle Fusion Applications Customer Relationship Management Enterprise Deployment Guide.

After performing the scale-out procedure, follow the steps in "Managing Report Processing and Delivery Server Load" to configure the processor threads for each cluster instance.

6.7 Diagnosing Report Processing Issues

The following tools enable you to diagnose report processing and delivery issues:

• Scheduler Diagnostics page

• Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Applications Control (Fusion Applications Control)

6.7.1 Using the Scheduler Diagnostics Page

The Scheduler Diagnostics page provides the runtime status of the scheduler. It provides status of its JMS configuration, JMS queues, cluster instances, scheduler Database, Toplink, and Oracle Enterprise Scheduler.

To access the Scheduler Diagnostics page:

1. Navigate to the Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher Administration page.

2. In the System Maintenance group, click Scheduler Diagnostics.

   The Scheduler Diagnostics page is shown in Figure 6-4:

   Figure 6-4 BI Publisher Scheduler Diagnostics Page

   
   

   For more information about this page see the "Scheduler Diagnostics" topic in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Administrator's Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher (Oracle Fusion Applications Edition).

6.7.2 Using Fusion Applications Control

For information on using Fusion Applications Control to diagnose issues with Oracle BI Publisher, see the "Diagnosing and Resolving Issues in BI Publisher" topic in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Administrator's Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher (Oracle Fusion Applications Edition).

6.8 Configuring System Properties for Reporting

Use the Oracle BI Publisher Runtime Configuration page to set the system-level runtime properties for reports.

To access the Runtime Configuration page:

1. Navigate to the Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher Administration page (see "Navigating to the Oracle BI Publisher Administration Page").

2. In the Runtime Configuration group, click Properties.

   For more information about this page see the "Defining Runtime Configurations" chapter in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Administrator's Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher (Oracle Fusion Applications Edition).