Read the Status of Dispatchers and Services

To evaluate how IBM® Cognos® is performing, you can use the BI Bus API to retrieve information about the dispatchers and services configured for your environment. This information includes, among other details, the status of a service, the volume of requests, and the time required to handle the requests. Note that only the properties specified in the query are returned, along with the search path to the object of the query.

If a dispatcher has an unknown status, it may be too busy to show its information or it may not be responding. You can test the dispatcher (Test Dispatchers) to see whether it responds. If dispatchers and services are not performing as expected, you can tune their performance by changing their configuration settings (Tune Server Performance).

To read the status information, use the content » query(searchPath, properties, sortBy, options) method to locate the dispatcher or service you want to investigate, and retrieve the bibus » dispatcher » runningState property. The same method can be used to query the runningState property of each of the services contained by a dispatcher. For more information about available services, see List of Services.

You can also use IBM Cognos Administration to obtain metrics about the status of your dispatchers and services.

To monitor system metrics externally to IBM Cognos Administration, you can use Java Management Extensions (JMX), a technology that supplies tools to manage and monitor applications and service-oriented networks. The information from Content Manager obtained this way is current, as opposed to the information obtained using a BI Bus API request that is not updated on a regular basis by default.