Monitoring System Performance For An SAP Application

Before performance testing a live application, we would first need to understand the performance goals and requirements. By obtaining and analyzing the existing performance metrics, we get a thorough idea on the system performance and this can be used for further benchmarking purpose. And these data are extremely important if an upgrade activity has been planned in the future with which the existing performance is to be compared with. Crystal clear SLAs are to be defined in the requirement gathering phase itself and this needs to be agreed upon by the stake holders. Given below is the standard procedure for extracting the relevant data to analyze and set up the performance SLAs for an existing SAP GUI system before any major upgrades.

Extracting performance metrics and logs from an SAP System

• Getting the preliminary data for performance testing is relatively easy with SAP systems owing to the inbuilt capability and reporting facility that SAP comes with. Before deep diving into these features, it is important that we understand some frequently used SAP terminologies. For instance, we are aware that any live SAP system will have a central “Computing Center Management System (CCMS)” which can be used to monitor, analyze and distribute the workload of clients and to display the resource usage of system components.  From CCMS it is possible to monitor a CPU host system, the DB, OS and SAP services, i.e. we can obtain CPU utilization rate, average workload for last few minutes and so on
• There are several inbuilt monitors available with SAP: Workload monitor, Global work load monitor, Operating system monitors, Database monitors etc. To obtain statistical data for the ABAP kernel, workload monitor may be used (ST03) and global work load monitor (ST03G) may be used to display statistical records for entire landscapes (SAP R/3 and non-SAP R/3 systems).Database monitors are used to obtain the KPIs of the DB system. The SAP official documentation covers the configuration and utilization of these monitors
• For analyzing the performance of a system, it is good to start with workload monitoring, especially the Response Time Distribution. In the workload monitor, we have different views for workload analysis (check official documentation). Transaction ST03 will fire the workload monitor and we can select the particular instance and duration to which we need the response time distribution from the workload tree. The workload distribution is obtained by selecting “Response Time distribution” in analysis view type
• The output area contains three tab pages with the following characteristics:

• In addition, workload monitor can be used to display the no of users working on an instance, workload distribution, transaction response time details and their memory utilization, spool requests volume and much more. If we are concerned about workload distribution amongst individual service types, we might need to use global workload monitor (ST03G)
• Operating system monitors and Database monitors are useful when analyzing the performance of the OS and DBs (alert monitor – RZ20 may be used for the same). Below is the standard  monitoring architecture diagram
• Most commonly used SAPGUI monitor transactions are ST03N, OS-Monitoring ST06,  buffer related Monitoring ST02, DB Monitoring (ST04), user distribution Monitoring (ST07)

Source: SAP community forum and official documentation

Backup for SAP

This Blog talks about the ways and the significance of backup.

Storage is energetic to any computer system. It is doubly vital to an ERP system which serves as the memory for the business. Lose that memory and you’re out of business.

Backups are copies of all the important data on your system taken and preserved in such a way that you can recover your data no matter what happens. Making backups and being sure you have good ones is a best business practice. Typically an SAP system will have one or more storage administrators to take care of storage and backup systems. However as manager of the SAP system it’s important that you understand the basics of backup because it is so intimately connected with running a successful SAP system

Basically, ‘backup’ refers to three different things, only one of which is truly backup. There is short-term backup, which preserves a copy of the document for a short time, typically a week or two. There is true backup which saves a copy for a year or so. Then there is archival backup which saves important data permanently – or at least for five years.

FIX Protocol develops standards for European consolidated tape

In a move billed by the standards-setting body as a key milestone in the development of an EU-wide consolidated tape, Fix Protocol Limited has released a set of standards for the consolidation of trade reports and market data for European equity markets.

The recommendations from the group aim to identify where the trade was issued, in what currency, and where it was executed, down to the nearest microsecond.

Oracle R12 Applications Using LoadRunner

The Challenge

We recently load tested our first Oracle R12 release (All modules for nationwide and international wide of Oracle ERP R12). The company was upgrading to R12 from 11.5.8 largely for performance reasons.

We knew we’d be “cutting new ground” with LoadRunner on R12. This became evident with our first testrecord-and-playback, which failed even after finding and fixing all the missing correlations. We raised a ticket with HP (SR# #4622615067), and with their initial help, step by step we overcame all the nuances of coaxing vugen to record successfully, and then creatively working around its inability to recognize the full set of identifiers for a new java ITEMTREE object.

Configuring Oracle Unified Directory (OUD) 11g as a Directory Server

I used Oracle Unified Directory (OUD) Version 11.1.1.5.0 during my test deployment locally here. I tried to collect as much information possible in this post for configuration.

Ideally, there are three possible configuration options for OUD:

• as a Directory Server
• as a Replication Server
• as a Proxy Server

Directory Server provides the main LDAP functionality in OUD. Proxy server can be used for proxying LDAP requests. And Replication Server is used for replication from one OUD to another OUD or even to another ODSEE (earlier Sun Java Directory) server. You can my previous posts on OUD here and here.

In this post, we will talk about configuring OUD after installation as a Directory Server. You can read about OUD installation in my previous post here.