OBIEE 11g BI Services - Dependencies and Unwarranted Start Up Failures

While starting OBIEE 11g BI Services, sometimes the BI Services can start very slowly and as a consequence the other BI Services which are dependent may not have started quickly enough in time for communication checks etc and eventually the service times out.

I have seen this issue many times. There must be some sort of dependencies between these services. Are these dependencies are taken into account while starting up services? I don’t think so.  This blog is an attempt to share some of the solutions from Oracle Support which would help to avoid unwarranted startup failures.

The Cluster Controller failure is very common, please refer OBIEE 11g Cluster Controller Failed to Start (Doc ID 1468070.1) document from Oracle Support.

Manual Start 

Manual start the BI Services using command from the OPMN is a quite obvious option. A command to start the cluster controller is as below.

opmnctl startproc ias-component=coreapplication_obiccs1

This might fix the issue. If not I would recommend to consider following options.

Re-arranging the Sequence BI Services   

One of the option is to make sure that cluster controller should be the last the BI process to run as it checks the communication between the various BI components.

opmnctl startproc ias-component=coreapplication_obis1
opmnctl startproc ias-component=coreapplication_obijh1
opmnctl startproc ias-component=coreapplication_obips1
opmnctl startproc ias-component=coreapplication_obisch1
opmnctl startproc ias-component=coreapplication_obiccs1

If this works for you then it is great, unfortunately it did not work for me.

Adding pause between the Starting of each Service

In addition to rearrangement suggested in previous section, adding pause between the starting of each service would be helpful to avoid failures

opmnctl startproc ias-component=coreapplication_obiccs1
call wait 10
opmnctl startproc ias-component=coreapplication_obis1
call wait 10
opmnctl startproc ias-component=coreapplication_obijh1
call wait 10
opmnctl startproc ias-component=coreapplication_obips1
call wait 10
opmnctl startproc ias-component=coreapplication_obisch1
The call wait time should be based on input provided by operating system Administrator and it should suits to the BI environment.

I hope you find this blog useful.