OBIEEintermediate
iBots / Agents & Alerts
Explain how scheduled agents (formerly iBots) deliver proactive, condition-based alerts and content distribution in OBIEE.
Agents (the modern name for what was historically called iBots) turn OBIEE from a pull-based tool — where users log in and look for insights — into a push-based one, where the system tells relevant people when something needs attention. This is a favorite interview topic because it demonstrates understanding of "actionable BI" rather than passive reporting.
It's the difference between a smoke detector (alerts only when there's actually smoke) and a nightly PA announcement reminding everyone to check for fires themselves — Agents are the smoke detector.
Key Concepts
1
An Agent is a scheduled or event-triggered job that runs an analysis (or a whole dashboard page), evaluates an optional condition (does the result set contain any rows, or does a specific analysis return true/false), and if the condition is met, performs one or more delivery actions: emailing a formatted report, publishing to a dashboard's Alerts section, invoking a Java/Web service action, or triggering a downstream workflow. Recipients can be a static distribution list or dynamically resolved (e.g., "send each region manager only their region's numbers" using per-recipient personalization tied to session variables — a technique called bursting in the agent/delivers context, conceptually similar to BI Publisher bursting).
conditiondelivery actionsbursting
2
Agents are configured through Oracle BI Delivers in the web UI (or programmatically via the Scheduler/Job Manager), with schedule options ranging from simple recurring times to complex calendar-based schedules, and they rely on the Java Host component for certain advanced actions and the mail server (SMTP) configuration in Enterprise Manager for email delivery.
Oracle BI DeliversJava Host
3
A real interview differentiator is knowing the difference between a plain scheduled report blast and a *conditional* alert — the value of Agents is precisely that they only notify when a business condition is actually true (e.g., "inventory below reorder point"), reducing alert fatigue versus emailing a static report to everyone every morning regardless of content.