BiWhy – Diagnostics Platform: Feature Overview

[ilya_ulyanov]

Disclaimer:
Update: BiWhy is once again available for free to everyone at biwhy.net.

BiWhy is a comprehensive diagnostics platform with a strong focus on capabilities that enhance SAP BusinessObjects monitoring, administration, and troubleshooting, while also supporting broader diagnostic and support use cases beyond BOBJ.

BiWhy – Diagnostics Platform: Feature overview

This is a brief overview of BiWhy capabilities, grouped by area.

1. SAP BusinessObjects diagnostics and administration

• BOBJ metrics monitoring – deep analysis of server metrics using trees, tables, charts, filters, automated checks, landscape summaries, and multi-system logon configurations.
• CMS DB analysis – snapshot analysis, history, object counts and size allocation, time trends, and snapshot comparison for change analysis or promotion validation.
• CMS DB queries – advanced CMC-style administration with trees, tables, detailed property analysis, query libraries, Excel export, parent-child flattening, automated ID-to-name resolution, calculated measures, and offline analysis.
• CMS actions – flexible actions on CMS objects such as update, delete, move, and pause or resume jobs, based on flexible CMS queries.
• Rights analysis – effective and explicit rights evaluation, including recursive checks across folder structures and filtering by selected principals.
• Sessions – user and session analysis, including divergence, durations, timeout patterns, multiple concurrent sessions, and bulk session termination.
• Publications – analysis of durations, duration per recipient, counts, and source reports.

2. Host / OS-level monitoring

• Host / OS-level monitoring – CPU, memory, disk, network, and process-level metrics, with views designed for fast identification of abnormal resource usage.
• OS command – scheduled command execution with filtering and interactive output analysis.

3. Java diagnostics

• Java threads – thread-dump analysis with SAP JVM-specific details such as CPU, files, network, and elapsed time. Supports grouping by thread type, identification of CPU or memory abusers, correlation of threads to traffic or opened files, stack-change walkthroughs, and charting of thread states.
• Java stacks – stack simplification and comparison to highlight common and divergent paths, with options to show or hide parameters and packages for readability.
• Java JARs – index-once lookup for identifying which JAR provides a given class.
• Java JMX – multi-process and multi-host JMX monitoring with tree, table, and chart analysis, useful for both BOBJ and general Java application diagnostics.

4. Logs and trace analysis

• GLF logs – end-to-end analysis with automated time-consumer detection, grouping, flow trees by workflow or host/server, statistics, mining, RFC and business transaction views, and interactive cross-linked visualizations.
• AO logs – end-to-end and network-time analysis with grouping, tree view, tables, and charts.
• HAR logs (beta) – basic HAR-file analysis.
• SM50 logs – parsing of ABAP SM50 logs into tables and charts for activity and performance analysis.
• WER – summary of Windows Error Reporting files.
• WEBI ErrorInfo – summary view of WebIntelligence.errorinfo files.

5. Files, XML, and text analysis

• XML – browsing and comparison of large XML structures, including difference highlighting, search, shortened paths, and filtering of empty, zero-valued, or duplicate attributes.
• Files – directory indexing and environment comparison with fast search, hiding of common files, and filtering of nonessential files such as logs or temporary files.
• Text tools – list comparison, file-line comparison, unique entry analysis, counts, and converters.
• File collection tool – collection of files such as logs, JARs, XML, and properties files across multiple hosts, with filtering by time or extension, progress tracking, statistics, zipping, and auto-assisted configuration.

6. SQL client, data access, and analytics

• Audit DB / general SQL client – JDBC-based querying with DELETE and UPDATE disabled for additional safety, fetch-array-size performance testing, interruption of long fetches, select/fetch statistics, query-building assistance, available-filter discovery, automated ID-to-name resolution, and Audit DB drilldown.
• BiWhy table – embedded analytics with filters, grouping, statistical analysis, useful renderers such as duration and bytes, and flexible charts. In some scenarios, it goes beyond Excel, for example with no row limits and better handling of multi-column or long-string analysis.
• Analytics – import of external data into BiWhy tables using reusable templates for separators, escape characters, and time formats.
• Other common features – search, regular expressions, performance and contextual logs, timers, caching, persistent settings, save/load capability, and embedded documentation.

7. Features in development

• HTTP client – HTTP and REST request execution for configuration checks and automation when browser access is not possible or convenient.
• Report structure – visibility into which data-source fields are used in reports and where.
• Export / archiving – export or download of reports to local files in selected formats.