The traditional way to check what’s happening in your model was to use tm1top, a windows command line utility. IBM has removed it starting v10 and while for the moment it’s back we’ll have a look at your options going forward in the cloud era.

TM1top has been around for ages but also haven’t changed at all ever since.

It allows you to check the internal processes (‘threads’) going on in TM1, cancel them or log this information to a flat file. The main use really is to see if/how long processes or calculations take in TM1 and to understand the locks held. This article provides a great in-depth review of the tool, how to set it up and more importantly TM1 Locking.

Though outside the scope of this article I highly recommend to familiarize yourself with the way TM1 Locking works. The best description I found is in the book ‘IBM Cognos TM1: The Official Guide’ and the ‘Lock Contention Management Playbook’.

Understanding locking is the key to be able to make sense of the information presented by TM1Top and other tools. It’s also Indispensable in designing high-performance, lockless (as much as possible) systems.

For a more in-depth review of the topic see my conference presentations from 2013, ‘Engineering for performance’.

So now you understand what to do with the information, but how do you get it again? TM1Top is a solid but ageing tool with uncertain future. It needs to be installed and configured, and technical enough that no user without solid IT background would be comfortable using it even to do a simple check of what’s going on.

This is where the CUBEAC Admin Console module can help you:

Review and search all threads:

Find and cancel long running or blocked processes:

Users Online:

TM1 Instance Configuration: