UPDATE: See our recent SAP Performance Testing as a Service announcement.
Optimizing SAP performance of the newly implemented, upgraded, or migrated SAP environment should be one of the top priorities of an application or technology refresh project besides gaining some new functionality or business benefits. However, our experience shows that most customers either short-cut these efforts or they are done as an afterthought. Even when it is baked into the plan, often there are controversies about how to best approach performance testing, monitoring, and optimization as part of an overall performance assurance methodology. The results frequently reflect post-go-live issues which hinder availability, and end-user experience, and cause management and operation teams many headaches.
In this post, we will cover some essential items and best practices to consider when planning performance assurance around the life cycle management of an SAP environment. We'll also point out some useful tools you can use to implement these tips, where appropriate.
To avoid performance shortfalls and end-user disappointment, we're summarizing the best practices in a complete performance assurance plan:
Phase 1: Sizing & Architecture Design
Phase 2: Business Service Level Agreement
Phase 3: Plan, Build, Deploy, and Test
Phase 4: Monitor, Optimize
Phase 5: Baseline and Continuous Service Level Management
Sizing and the design of the architecture that follows is the first important phase of any project. A step in the wrong direction will likely derail the project. The topic sounds technical, right? Actually, sizing involves as much of the business as the IT team. According to SAP, sizing involves 'Translating business requirements into hardware requirements - in an iterative process.' Gartner in its June 2014 article (Follow Three Best Practices to Optimize SAP Business Suite Application Performance) recommended to 'Perform annual capacity planning for each SAP Business Suite application to ensure sufficient hardware headroom through its life cycle'.
SAP sizing involves the collection of business metrics such as users, business transaction document volume, and line items which equates to SAPS (SAP Application Performance Standard) which is a hardware-independent measurement unit representing a throughput processing requirement. Certified Hardware partners who provide computing resources to SAP customers often measure the throughput of their platforms using the standard Sales & Distribution (SD) benchmark where 100 SAP = 2000 fully processed order line items per hour (or 6000 dialog steps - also known as interactive GUI screen changes). For more information, see SAP Standard Application Benchmarks.
There are 2 main approaches and tools associated, other approaches are combinations or deeper dives into the variations. Sizing needs to take into account whether it's a new implementation, upgrade, or migration as obviously an upgrade or migration may have better numbers from an existing production environment (e.g. SAP EarlyWatch report, or some monitoring report):
Architecture Design: Once the sizing information has been generated as standard SAPS, the customer can submit those to their platform vendor (which may now also include cloud providers). The vendor architect will map those requirements to CPU, Memory, Disk Size, I/O throughput, and Network load. Based on those requirements, platform-specific hardware or virtualized infrastructure options are proposed.
Tips:
Business Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are ways of measuring the quality of service that IT provides to the business units or end-user groups of the application. Sometimes they may be referred to internally in IT as Operational Level Agreement (OLA), which governs how the IT environment should operate to provide shared services to end-users. Before building, testing, and delivering any service, IT organizations should establish templates and metrics for which the Business can agree as the baseline for service quality. These items will become KPI (Key Performance Indicator) which are measured and reported for compliance on a periodic basis.
Common SLA metrics may include:
Tips:
Figure 1: Plan, Build, Deploy, and Test
Plan: the work and work the plan! Now that there are clear sizing, architecture, and SLA established, it's time to map out the tasks required to accomplish the delivery of a functional and efficient application environment. Depending on the size of the project, executive sponsorship must exist to create a project plan that includes availability and performance-related tasks at every step.
Build: Documentation must reflect the reference architecture chosen to support the availability and performance requirements determined in the previous two phases Sizing & Architecture, as well as SLA. Often, either a time gap and/or team gap occurs such that the build is done by a different team later and does not look anything like the original design
Deploy: Isn't it the same as Build? It can be if you're building only one system, it's not the case with SAP. Unless your environment is a single-system landscape, many customers will build development, QA, test/staging, DR, and Production. Sometimes a Production environment is built initially as a learning exercise for early testing but deployed again with various optimization or automation, especially in virtualized settings or software-defined data centers such as VMware.
Test: Validate the build and deployment to ensure it performs as expected in the areas of availability and performance. The more testing with objectives the better the operational readiness of the team and environment.
Tips:
Monitor: Gartner also listed the top 3 best practices as 'Implement proactive performance monitoring and trending for each SAP Business Suite application and its infrastructure' in its June 2014 article. Whatever SAP monitoring tools you choose, whether native vendor tools such as SAP Solution Manager, CCMS, or 3rd-party tools, consider the 10 Ways to Automate towards Smart Application Management.
Optimize: This can be at the infrastructure level (OS, DB, Storage, Network), application configuration, and custom code. Apply specific tuning recommendations from each vendor for the technology deployed. Poorly optimized code can be mistaken as performance issues at the infrastructure level, so application code analysis along with SQL analysis is typically the next level of optimization once monitoring has identified them as top consumers. Code inspectors can be used to identify poorly formed code which may appear fine when run against small volumes but grinds against large volumes of data.
Tips:
Baseline: involves the performance measurement at key times to capture what to expect under certain workloads, such as load tests, benchmarks, and other cycles like daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually. Pre-go-live tests and measurements should provide estimates of what to expect after going productive in the new environment. After go-live, the actual production workload at those cycles like month-end or some key peak workload times should be captured for comparisons and analysis.
Continuous SLM: Performance is dynamic and constantly changing based on business usage patterns and data volume over time, so continuous vigilance in monitoring, analysis, and optimizing is required to ensure capacity and configuration continue to meet demands.
Tips:
SAP Performance management is a complex subject that spans many teams, technology, and processes within the organization, but there are clear best practices with which to guide organizations of all shapes and sizes on ways to manage it as a life-cycle rather than a one-time occurrence. Whether implementing SAP for the first time, upgrading/patching, or migrating to new platforms, the effort spent will pay back many folds in operational efficiencies that ensure better user experience as well as business availability.
Looking for an integrated solution to help with many of the SAP Performance management needs? Try IT-Conductor, engineered as a cloud-based SAP Performance management platform. We also offer SAP Performance consulting via our partner solution at OZSOFT.