FDMEE: System Maintenance Tasks: Maintain Application Folder

Hello Friends,

FDMEE: System Maintenance Tasks series where we are going to cover Maintain Application Folder script.

If you have not yet read previous two posts of this blog series, I would suggest you to go through them here to get a comprehensive picture of FDMEE System Maintenance Tasks:

FDMEE: System Maintenance Tasks: Maintain FDMEE Data Tables

FDMEE: System Maintenance Tasks: Maintain ODI Session Data

In this third post, we will focus on the ‘Maintain Application Folder’ task and will see how to manually execute ‘Maintain Application Folder’ purge script.  

Important Note:

• This post has been written and associated activities have been demonstrated on FDMEE version 11.1.2.4.210.
• There is no outage required on the FDMEE application to execute these purge scripts. But it is advisable not to run any data loads during the purge activity.
• Based on the data retention policy of your organization, you should pre-decide how many days of data you want to retain for FDMEE Application folders.
• Don't forget to take complete FDMEE schema backup before attempting to run these purge scripts.

Maintain Application Folder

Whenever you load data (files) through FDMEE, there are three types of files stored:

1. The file which you uploaded, is stored in the inbox directory
2. The export file, which is stored in the outbox directory
3. The data file, which is stored in the data directory.

All these files remain on your FDMEE server or network location (server) and often gradually cause your disk storage space to get full. These files themselves are not that important, as the data is stored in both, the FDMEE database as well as your target EPM application (Essbase, Planning, HFM, etc.) database.

The “Maintain Application Folder” script is used to clean up FDMEE Inbox, Outbox, and Data (excluding Data\Scripts subfolder) folders by the number of days entered as an input parameter for these folders.

FDMEE checks the inbox and outbox subfolders under the respective folders and deletes any files present over there. In the data subfolder, FDMEE skips the scripts subfolder because it contains your custom, event, and import scripts. Cleanup also includes Reports and Logs under the Outbox folder that are associated with Process IDs.

Maintain Application Folder (deleting old files from FDMEE inbox, outbox and Data directories) script saves you a lot of disk space as these folders' size gets bigger with time, if not housekept regularly.

When you execute ‘Maintain Application Folder’ purge script, it seeks following input parameters to be entered:

• Target Application
• Days to keep Inbox directory
• Days to keep Outbox directory
• Days to keep Data directory

If the Days to keep value is not specified for a specific folder (Inbox/Outbox/Data), FDMEE skips that folder for file deletion.

Step-by-Step process to execute ‘Maintain Application Folder’ purge script

1- Log in to Workspace with Admin credentials.

2- Open FDMEE console (Data Management) from Workspace and on the Workflow tab, under Other, select Script Execution:

3- In Script Execution, and then in Custom Script Group, select System Maintenance Tasks.

4- From the Scripts grid, select Maintain Application Folder script and Click Execute.

5- It will prompt to enter the following input parameters: 

6- Click on the search icon for Target Application and select the application name from the list.

7- Now enter Days to keep for Inbox, Outbox and Data directories.

For example, to retain files under these three folders for the last 3 months, enter 90 (days):

8- Keep Execution mode selected as Online. The online method processes the report immediately.

Execution modes:

online  — ODI processes the data in sync mode (immediate processing).

offline — ODI processes the data in async mode (runs in background).

7- Optionally, If you want to schedule the purge script run rather than running it instantly, Click on Schedule option and enter the scheduling details as per your requirement.

8- If you want to instantly run the purge script, then directly click on OK (not on the Schedule option).

You will see a message informing the process ID of your script run as shown below:

9- To see the status of your script execution, click on the Process Details link under the Workflow tab—Monitor—Process Details. 

10- Above we can see our script with Process ID 8144 has executed successfully. 

Click on the Show button for Process ID 8144 to open the corresponding log file.

In the log file, look for the message "Maintain Application Folder: Completed" to confirm that script has run successfully without any error. If you encounter any errors, troubleshoot them based on the cause mentioned in the log file. In our case, we see no issue in the script execution.

Note, you need to repeat all of the above steps for other target applications too where your FDMEE data loads are happening. 

Once you are done with running the Maintain Application Folder purge script for all of your selected target applications, you can check FDMEE Inbox, Outbox and Data directories to verify the deleted files.

That's all for this post. 

Maintain Application Folder purge script can be automated to run using Executescript batch file located in the folder: 

<drive>\Oracle\Middleware\user_projects\epmsystem1_fdm\FinancialDataQuality.

DRM Error:There are currently no applications available for login

Most of you would have faced DRM Error:There are currently no applications available for login error while logging to DRM Web-client. No exception to that, I too faced one such instance in recent times.

In this post, we will see what are things to check in DRM when you encounter this error and how this issue got fixed for me.

Note: This post has been written and associated activities have been demonstrated on DRM version 11.1.2.4.344.

One fine morning, one of our DRM users had reported that he is not able to login to DRM Web Client encountering following error message:

Error: There are currently no applications available for login 

Immediately I opened DRM Web Client to confirm whether it's working with ADMIN credentials or not. Like the user, I too faced the same error even with DRM ADMIN account.

When I checked the DRM Web services status in service panel, they were running perfectly fine.

To cross-check the DRM Web Services status, I connected to DRM Configuration Console (as an Administrator):

In Configuration Console, I noticed that, though DRM Web services were up and running, DRM application was stopped.

I thought why not first validate the database connection here and did the same. 

Database connection was successful.

Its time to start the application.

But starting application did not work. I could see, the application was still in stopped state.

Alright, let's search for some errors now.

Open the Windows Event Viewer and Explore Windows Logs-->Application

I noticed total 3 DRM error messages recorded in Event viewer:

Error-1:

Error-2:

Error-3:

Going through the above DRM Error messages, we come to know that DRM application engine could not be started because of:

DRM-63015: Read/Write engine for Application on DRM Server will not start because another Application is currently using the same repository.

Generally, 'DRM-63015' error message indicates that your DRM schema might be locked because some other DRM application has already connected to it i.e. when two DRM applications try to connect to the same DRM schema at the same time, we face 'DRM-63015' error.

This happens when you have two DRM application servers in your Hyperion environment i.e. two DRM Configuration consoles and the secondary DRM application server has been configured to connect to the same DRM schema as the primary DRM application server and you try to start the DRM application on both the servers at the same time.

Ideally, you need to ensure that only one DRM console has been configured to connect to any given DRM schema.

But, in my Hyperion environment, there is only one DRM Server and only one DRM application. So the above scenario is not applicable at least in my case.

Also when I checked, my DRM Schema was not Locked:

So let's proceed further by trying a few troubleshooting steps.

Do 'iisreset' on DRM application server

As DRM's primary web interface runs through IIS (Microsoft Internet Information Service), there's a chance bouncing IIS will free up whatever rogue session might have been locking things up for you.

To bounce IIS service, open a command prompt on your DRM application server and type "iisreset":

If this workaround works for you, it's well and good, If not, move to the next troubleshooting step (For me it didn't work).

'Apply Updates' in DRM Configuration console

To 'Apply Updates' I followed the following steps: 

1- Opened Windows service panel and stopped DRM Web services. 

2- Checked the DRM Configuration console to ensure DRM services are stopped.

3- Now goto DRM Configuration console and select Application-->Apply Updates

4- Click OK on below message while Applying updates:

5- You will see below CMD window opened. As there were actually no updates to apply so we see the message: No updates were applied. 

Press SPACE key to continue. CMD window will be closed then. 

6- Goto the service panel and start DRM Web services on all the servers. 

7- Check DRM Web services status in DRM Configuration console. Both DRM Web services are up and running fine. Also notice, our DRM application too has been successfully started this time.

8- When I opened DRM web-client, my DRM application was available to login.

9- And application login too was working as expected.

So the issue is fixed for me. :-)

We know that Applying Updates to DRM application refreshes the database connection apart from making any changes like patch upgrade, config changes, etc. in your DRM application, effective. 

But exactly what has caused this issue is still not known. This workaround has fixed this issue for me in one go so it can be used as a temporary fix.

Please note, this DRM error "There are currently no applications available for login" can occur due to many reasons. My case was only one of them. 

You need to check the Windows Event Viewer on your DRM server in order to identify the exact root cause of the problem as Event Viewer will most likely have an error message recorded related to your DRM error.