In a previous article, I explained how Pulse can help you when Excel is hanging. Now we’re going to see how Pulse can help you when a user complains that TM1 slow down.

Don’t get me wrong, TM1 is fast. It has by far the most powerful calculation engine on the market, but as software it might happen that in rare occasion it slows down.

When one of your user complains that TM1 is slow, it’s fair to say that with TM1 you’re a bit harmless. Maybe the user is right or wrong, maybe it is just a subjective experience but you cannot be sure.

In this article I’ll show you how Pulse can help you to confirm such statement. If the user is right and TM1 is or was slow, you will be able to explain why.

For this example, let’s say that Anthony Taylor complains that TM1 is slow.

The first thing you can do with Pulse is to go to the User Sessions and check the Waiting % for this user.

Pulse keeps track of every user sessions. For each user you can see how many % of their time they spent waiting, in the example below, we can see that they all spent less than 1% of their time waiting which is not too bad:

You can drill to one specific user by clicking on his name. Let’s check the long running operations chart:

By default Pulse will consider as a long running operation everything (run TI, open cube view, spreadsheets…) which takes more than 10 sec. In the example above, we can see that one operation took 460 sec. So now let’s find out what is this operation.

In the operation tab, you can see the details of all operations for a specific time frame. If you click on the left arrow you see exactly what was happening. In the example below you can see that it took 252 sec to retrieve a view from the Wholesale cube:

We’ve found out that there is an issue with the Wholesale cube, now we’ll try to find out what is the cause of this issue. In the cube list report you’ll see all cubes statistics:

Clicking on the name of the cube (in this example: Wholesale) will display further details of the cube.:

In the example above we can see that the cube as 1.3 millions cells populated and more than 7 millions are fed. When the number of cells is two times higher than the number of populated cells, it clearly means that the cube is overfed.

In order to anticipate these type of situations, you can set up alerts in Pulse which will send you an email if users are waiting for more than a certain time.

in this example, the user was right. TM1 was slow because of a feeder issue in the Wholesale cube. In this scenario, Pulse helped us to find out when the user was waiting and why he was waiting.

A similar situation happened at one of our Pulse client. One of their TM1 user complained to the CFO that TM1 is very slow and sometimes he was not able to access his reports. The TM1 administrator was able to find out all the operations which were taking more than 10 sec and he found out that the user was trying to access the TM1 reports at 10 pm while the nightly chores were running.

Pulse allowed the TM1 administrator to investigate the issue and come up with the solution (the user should not access the report at 10pm when the nightly chores are running)..