Workarounds for the issue where BICS Connections to SAP BW are not getting released

[Prabhith]

Hi ALL,

The day after our BO dashboards(where Bex queries act as source through BICS methodolgy) went live, we observed that many of our colleagues are not able to log into BW systems and they are getting the following error messages.

The above error messages clearly shows that the 'Maximum number of connected terminals have been reached in the BW application server'.

Some similar error message is coming while refreshing BO reports as well.

We were thinking of the various changes that has happened to our environment that has made the increase in the terminals.

We decided to log into SM04 to find the number of active users in the BW production environment.

Yes.... the SM04 screen was terrifying...

We hardly have 50 active BW users and above screen shows 296 users logged on with 299 modes.

What was more surprising was the presence of the user BOUSR_ALL which is having more than 180+ entries in the SM04 screen.

BOUSR_ALL was the service user which was created to schedule the webi reports on a daily basis.

As you all know in BICS connection envrionment, the webi reports are scheduled on a daily basis(like BW Process chains) which fetch data from BW and using the live office connection, the fetched data is shown in the daily basis on the dashboards.

The theory is OK  but why? why didn't the connections get terminated after the webi reports ran successfully.

And why the residue of BO webi schedules are still present in BW?

We started searching for the real culprit? We all are consultants and we are paid for the technical skills/Knowledge which we possess. We started thinking whether we missed any simple check box which could terminate these sessions after usage. This is a pretty serious issue as it is preventing both BW and BO to work properly.Finally our eyes got stuck in the below SAP Note which made us more disappointed!

'1903067 - BICS Connections to SAP BW are not released after some Scheduling workflows for Web Intelligence'

Resolution

This issue is tracked under defect ID:  ADAPT01694500

The following maintenance releases will contain a fix that will close this document instance after the schedule button is clicked

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence 4.0 SP08+ (4.0.8.0+)

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence 4.1 SP02+ (4.1.2.0+)

NOTE:  This fix will only account for the schedule workflow and will still leave a connection open if the Cancel button is clicked

instead of the Schedule button.  There may be other workflows that this fix does not account for as well so if you do see this issue,

please document the detailed workflow and contact Product Support to investigate further.

We are in BO4.0 SP6 and since we don't have a permanent solution as per the above note, we did the following activities in BW and BO side as a work around to solve the above issue:

1) In BW side, changed the following parameter settings in RZ11.

a) rdisp/tm_max_no  :  This is the parameter which restricts the terminals. It was increased to 2000 from its default value which is 200.

b) rdisp/gui_auto_logout : Auto-log out time was set to 1200 seconds with the help of this parameter.

c) login/disable_multi_gui_login: Multiple login using same user id feature was disables using this parameter.

PS: If the dynamic switchable check box is tick marked, you can change the setting without server shut down, For all other case, server shutdown is mandatory.

2) After ensuing that the BO webi reports have ran successfully, we manually terminated all the entries of the user 'BOUSR_ALL'.

3) In BO side, the connections will release on their own after the default 20 minute timeout. But accidently we had changed the changed the time out to1 hour. This was again changed to 30 minutes.

The above workarounds solved our problem, at least for the time being!

BR

Prabhith