EPMA: Transform Classic to EPMA Wizard: Communication error occurred: %1

Hi Friends,

In this post, we will discuss an Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management Architect (EPMA) error “communication error occurred: %1” which we encountered while using ‘Transform classic to EPM Architect Wizard’ in Workspace and will see how it got fixed.

Important Note: 

• This post has been written and associated activities have been demonstrated on Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management Architect (EPMA) version 11.1.2.4.000.2614
• It's very important to test any workaround/fix first in a non-Prod environment, and move/apply it to PROD only when you are fully sure about its workability.

Problem description

Actually, as part of Oracle Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) application cloning activity from PROD to TEST, we imported our PROD HFM app (an EPMA app) to the TEST environment. 

Then to complete the migration, we were trying to convert the imported Classic HFM app to EPMA in our TEST environment. But when we opened ‘Transform classic to EPM Architect Wizard’ from Workspace (Launch Workspace -> Navigate ->Administer-> Transform Classic to EPM Architect), the application summary page first took 30 mins showing the “Loading….” message. Eventually, it threw this below message:

Error: communication error occurred: %1

The following images will show you the issue replication:

Troubleshooting

We immediately checked the Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management Architect (EPMA) log: (E:\apps\OracleEPM\Middleware\user_projects\domains\EPMSystem\servers\EpmaWebReports0\logs\EPMA.log) to see EPMA web-tier activities during the live issue and noticed following error message appeared multiple times:

[SRC_CLASS:com.hyperion.awb.web.util.MessageRetriever] [SRC_METHOD:getMessage] [[java.util.MissingResourceException: Can't find resource for bundle java.util.PropertyResourceBundle, key The application ID (HSS) for application name: ESBAPP............................

Point to note was that 39 of the registered Essbase apps were causing an error like above. 

Actually, the Application Summary page of ‘Transform classic to EPM Architect Wizard’ shows the applications list to which the user has access to transform. If the ‘logged in user’ is not provisioned as ‘Application Administrator’ for an application; the user will not be able to migrate that application to EPMA. For all those applications which cannot be transformed, an explanation is provided in the ‘Comment’ column. Following are a few messages which are normally observed in the 'comment' column of Application Summary page for the apps which are nontransformable:  

• Application view already exists
• User must be provisioned as Application Administrator for this application.
• Connection to the Essbase server failed.

The Application Summary page’s applications list is extracted from the Hyperion Shared Services server/schema. It displays all the applications of your Oracle Hyperion environment like Hyperion Essbase, Hyperion Planning, Hyperion HFM, etc. which are registered with Oracle Hyperion Shared services.

Before populating the applications list for the transformation, it also validates that application by connecting to the respective application server (like Essbase Server, HFM Server), EPMA application library, and Hyperion Shared Services provisioning of that application, etc. So if the number of applications is very large, the Application Summary page is supposed to take some time in order to populate the list. 

In our case, Transform classic to EPM Architect Wizard was encountering a communication error while fetching the details of those 39 Essbase apps from Oracle Hyperion Shared Services and validating the same with the Hyperion Essbase server. For sure there was some conflict that was delaying the process of populating the applications list eventually causing that communication error after 30 mins of loading. The reason why it was happening is still unknown (let me know your thoughts on the same). 

Solution that worked for us:

We first tried with restarting all the Hyperion services including EPMA and Hyperion Essbase services but that didn't help.

As the error in EPMA.log was pointing to Essbase apps, we next focussed our attention to the same and noticed there were a total of 86 Essbase cubes/apps in our environment including so many ‘not so important’ cubes created for various testing, data validation etc. purposes.

Deleting unwanted apps from your Oracle Hyperion environment not only improves the apps loading time in Application Summary page of Transform Classic to EPM Architect Wizard but also saves your server resources from being unnecessarily consumed. 

So we triggered an Essbase apps cleanup drive and deleted around 40 unwanted Essbase applications after consulting their usability with business users and applications team (similarly you can plan for deleting other unwanted apps like HFM too).

Post this unwanted Essbase apps cleanup drive, we again ran ‘Transform Classic to EPM Architect Wizard’ and observed that the Application Summary page got populated with all the applications in less than 4 mins as shown below:

Thus the communication error ‘communication error occurred: %1’ got resolved for us.

That's all for this post.

I hope this article has helped you. 

Your suggestions/feedback are most welcome.

Keep learning and Have a great day!!!