iBots/Agents in OBIEE and How to Manage and Debug an iBots/Agents?

iBot is Intelligent Bursting and Output Tool

iBot is an utility available in OBIEE which is used for reports scheduling as well as Alerts sent to the required recipients on different web accessible/communication devices.”

IBot (10g) or Agents (11g) deliver targeted analytics to users based on a combination of schedule & trigger event. Delivery can be by a variety of routes, for example to Dashboard Alerts or to e-mail.

iBots are

• software-based intelligent agents used to access, filter, and perform analysis on data.
• software-based engines that execute requests and generate responses to the appropriate people and devices
• Contain the following elements:

– Priority and visibility

– Conditional request

– Schedule

– Recipients

– Delivery content

– Destination

• Can also execute scripts
• They may be event-based or scheduled. They provide constant monitoring and intelligence spanning operational and business intelligence sources.
• They dynamically detect problems and opportunities. They determine whom to notify and how to deliver responses across a wide variety of devices (including Web, wireless, mobile & voice)

Administration

By using the Manage Agent Sessions page in Oracle BI Presentation Services Administration, we can monitor currently active agent sessions that are triggered by Oracle BI Scheduler.
For example, we can see a list of active agents per session.
When one or more agent sessions are active, information about each agent session is displayed, such as:

• the job identifier &
• the instance identifier 

Expanding the agent session shows the individual agents (one agent, or multiple agents if they are chained). The state of the agent is either Created, Populated, or Conditional Request Resolved.

Expanding a specific agent in a particular session shows the recipients for the agent and their type, such as the Engineering recipients defined in a group, or individual users. When the recipient is a group, the individual members of the group are not listed.

Log

If an agent fails to execute fully or if debugging is turned on in Oracle BI Scheduler, then a log file is generated for the agent.

• For 10G, on Ibot : OracleBI_Home\server\Log\iBots. See configuration tab of the scheduler to modify it.
• For 11G, The location for agent log files is specified in the instanceconfig.xml file for the Oracle BI Scheduler.