SAP Basis Monitoring for Workload Performance

The utilization of system resources often constitutes the system workload which can be measured using programs, transactions, jobs, sessions, or tasks. 

Workload generally comprises Performance, Service Level, Capacity & Configuration, Baseline & Trend

System workload can be represented in varied ways depending on the technology layer on which it is measured, for example, the OS level may use a process as its unit while the DB uses a session and the Application uses a transaction.

SAP performance management relates to workload monitoring on the basis of resource utilization and some of the metrics that can be monitored include transactions, reports, batch, RFC workloads, etc. Obtaining an accurate performance report requires a reliable monitoring solution such as IT-Conductor.

The importance of workload monitoring and its crucial role in performance management is reflected in the end-user experience of a system or application SLA. In view of this, using an effective tool to automate service level monitoring/performance as well as providing trending reports will improve end-user experience.

The following statistics are considered to be some of the most significant workload statistics deserving of attention:

• Average CPU time, Average response time, Average wait time, Average load time, GUI time, Roll-ins, Roll-outs, Roll time,

• Roll out time, Roll wait time, Database calls, Database requests, Average time per logical DB call.

Pre-delivered programs exist in SAP that can be used to collect and aggregate workload statistics like runtime statistics and store them in the SAP performance database.

SAP transaction ST03/ST03N can be used to review SAP workload and performance.

SAP Solution Manager, CCMS, EarlyWatch reports; all capture the analysis of system workload, however, these are historical reports and not monitors that can alert when their performance degrades.

The functions of the workload monitor include:

• Display and comparison of time profiles.

• Display of an instance workload

• Display of workload for Time, Database, GUI times, All data, etc.

• Display the number of users working on an application server.

• Display of the number of dialog steps executed by each user, and acceptable application server response times.

IT-Conductor focuses on Automating core Service Level Monitoring for Availability, Performance, and Alerts.  A large part of Performance management is monitoring Workloads.

IT-Conductor as a cloud-based Performance Intelligence solution is ever-growing in powerful features to support more complex workload types such as Web/JAVA applications, BOBJ, and BPC (Business Planning & Consolidation), especially if they are based on Netweaver Integrated Planning add-on.

Some IT-Conductor monitoring offerings include:

• Service-oriented workload monitoring: highly flexible service definitions e.g. a server that affects service.

• End-user experience services for tracking specific sets of key performance indicators for a custom set of metrics, such as user, transaction, locations, dialog vs HTTP, etc.

Having IT-Conductor as your preferred monitoring tool will afford you the benefit of assembling composite services from other services and monitors to perform drill down and unravel the root cause

IT-Conductor provides the ease of configuring target availability, response times, and notification if the goals are not met.

IT-Conductor workload monitoring covers

• Transactions, Jobs, Programs, Sessions, Workload types

• Users, Groups of users, user types

• Servers, terminals

• Time-stamped synchronized across other monitored components

IT-Conductor achieves this through workload retriever filters for matching criteria and brings detailed statistics for analytics, in-depth performance intelligence, etc.

Automated monitoring of your system workload using IT-Conductor will provide system administrators with varied and detailed information on CPU time, the number of database changes, roll-out times, and so on.

 With the aid of IT-Conductor monitoring solution, you gain a wide range of analysis views and data that will enable you to discover the source of performance problems quickly and easily.