Thursday, January 4, 2018

Windows 10 Update Killed Essbase On My Laptop!


Like many Essbase consultants and developers, I run Essbase server on my Windows 10 laptop. It was a lengthy ‘Creator’s Update’ Windows update and, once it was complete, Essbase was dead on my machine. So, what do I do? First, I didn’t panic; us pilots have a way of not panicking when things don’t go as planned. We have several people internally who had this happen to them over the past several months and we fixed it each time, so there was nothing to worry about.

The root cause was that my OPMN service, which runs Essbase, was gone. This happened on the other machines we have that experienced that in the past, so I went to talk with one of our resident infrastructure gurus, Jay Zuercher. I remembered there was a command that I could run to recreate the service; Jay had the command filed away somewhere and within a couple of minutes, he sent it to me:

SC CREATE "OracleProcessManager_epmsystem1" binPath="C:\oracle\middleware\epmsystem11r1\opmn\bin\opmn.exe -S -I c:\oracle\middleware\user_projects\epmsystem1”

I ran this command – as an administrator – and then went into services to set the service to start automatically and start the service running. That did not, however, result in Essbase coming back to life. Next, I looked at the Essbase logs and noted several issues having to do with security. Initially, I thought there may have been due to an issue with Shared Services, but then I remembered about the fairly common Essbase issue regarding a corrupted essbase.sec file. I don’t know if the corruption was related to the Windows Update, but the timing sure was suspect. I replaced the essbase.sec file with a backup copy and I was back in business.

Hopefully this doesn’t happen to you when you update Windows but, if it does, perhaps this blog post will make your recovery quick and painless.

6 comments:

Philip Hulsebosch said...

Hello Tim,
did you shutdown Essbase before the update, or was it still running?

Regards,
Philip

Tim Tow said...

Philip,

I did not shutdown Essbase before the update.

Tim

Doug Bice said...

we have recently upgraded 2 of our users to Windows 10 Pro laptops and have installed the Hyperion Essbase 6.2 Excel addin. the laptops have Office Pro 2010 installed(same as their Win7 laptops). when we launch Excel on the Win10 laptop it will come up with a client can't connect or some message(sorry i did not writ this down), click ok and Excel is up and running. i click on Addin, Essbase, Connect and enter in the server name, user name and pwd and on this one user it comes back with All Logins are currently in use. not sure what happens on the other user. i looked for Essbase.sec like you state above and do not find it on her Win7 laptop. in the environment variables i have the path for the Hyperion files in the first line. any ideas? thanks

Tim Tow said...

Doug,

We are finding that many customers cannot use the classic Add-In with Windows 10 and Excel 2016. I believe I have heard of people running the classic Add-In on Windows 10 and Excel 2010, but I am not sure.

We created the Dodeca Excel Add-In for Essbase to mirror the functionality of the classic Add-In in a modern, supportable way.

Tim

Doug Bice said...

so is the Essbase 6.2 addin not compliant for Windows 10 computers. with Windows 7 going out of support next year we need to get our Win7 computers replaced with Win10 computers. Not sure what needs to be done to get Essbase working in Windows 10. any help is appreciated
thank you

Tim Tow said...

Doug,

We created the Dodeca Excel Add-In for Essbase to be a drop-in replacement for the classic Essbase Add-In. I you are interested in learning more, go to our website at http://www.appliedolap.com and request a Dodeca demo. We can arrange a personalized webcast to show you how the Dodeca Excel Add-In works and we can arrange an evaluation copy for you to try.

Tim