admins

The case against single children

I came across hierarchies holding a single child.
While creating a consolidation over only 1 element might make sense in some hierarchies, some people just use consolidations as an alternative to aliases.
Either they just don't know they exist or they come from an age when TM1 did not have aliases yet.

The following process will help you identify all the "single child" elements in your system.
This effectively loops through all elements of all dimensions of your system, so this could be reused to carry out other checks.

Processes running history

On a large undocumented and mature TM1 server you might find yourself with a lot of processes and you wonder how many of them are still in use or the last time they got run.

The loganalysis.pl script answers these questions for you.

One could take a look at the creation/modification time of the processes in the TM1 Data folder however you would have to sit through pages of the tms1msg.log to get the history of a given process which is what the script below does.

Dimensions updates mapping

When faced with a large "undocumented" TM1 server, it might become hard to see how dimensions are being updated.

The following perl/graphviz script creates a graph to display which processes are updating dimensions.

The script dimflow.pl is looking for functions updating dimensions (DimensionElementInsert, DimensionCreate...) in .pro files in the TM1 datafolder and maps it all together.
Unfortunately it does not take into account manual editing of dimensions.

This is the result:

Monitoring chores by email part 2

Following up on monitoring chores by email, we will take a slightly different approach this time.
We use a "metaprocess" to execute all the processes listed in the original chore, check their return status and eventually act on it.
This allows for maximum flexibility as you can get that controlling process to react differently to any exit status of any process.

Monitoring chores by email

Using the script in the Send Email Attachments article, it is possible to set it up to automatically email the Admin when a process in a chore fails.

Here is how to proceed:

  
1. Setup admin email process
First we create a process to add an email field to the ClientProperties cube and add an email to forward to the Admin.

1.1 create a new process
---- Advanced/Parameters Tab, insert this parameter:
AdminEmail / String / / "Admin Email?"

Dynamic tm1p.ini and homepages in Excel

Pointing all your users to a single TM1 Admin host is convenient but not flexible if you manage several TM1 services.
Each TM1 service might need different settings and you do not necessarily want users to be able to see the development or test services for example.

mytm1.xla is an Excel addin that logs the users on a predefined server and settings as shown on that graph: