System Administration Assistant
This section introduces other general system monitoring tools, mainly from the Basis point of view. These tools come bundled in an SAP function called System Administration Assistant, which is accessible via transaction SSAA. SSAA contains SAP-recommended daily, weekly, monthly, nonscheduled, and occasional system monitoring tasks. The following procedure demonstrates the use of this function.
Work Instructions
Step 1. Run transaction SSAA. Click
SCREEN 13.19
Step 2. The opened Application help file indicates that SSAA is System Administration Assistant, an administration concept implemented by SAP for system administrators.
SCREEN 13.20
Step 3. Click
SCREEN 13.21
Result
We can now start the SAP-recommended daily, weekly, monthly, nonscheduled, and occasional system monitoring tasks.
We can also perform these tasks directly by running their corresponding transaction codes and UNIX commands (see Table 13.2).
| Frequency | Task | Transaction Code or UNIX Command |
|---|---|---|
| Daily | SAP: CCMS System Monitoring (General Monitoring Functions) | (See Note) |
| SAP: Checking the System Log | SM21 | |
| SAP: Output Devices in the SAP Spool System | SPAD | |
| SAP: Checking Spool Output Requests for Errors | SP01 | |
| SAP: Checking Work Process Status | SM51 | |
| SAP: Checking for ABAP Short Dumps | ST22 | |
| SAP: Checking for Update Errors | SM13 | |
| SAP: Checking Lock Entries | SM12 | |
| SAP: Checking Batch Input Sessions | SM35 | |
| SAP: Checking Background Jobs | SM37 | |
| Oracle: Backing Up and Checking the Database | DB13 | |
| Oracle: Backing Up and Checking Offline Redo Log Files | DB13 | |
| Oracle: Monitoring Database Growth | DB02 | |
| Oracle: Checking the Alert File | ST04 | |
| Oracle: Monitoring the Archive Log Directory | DB12 | |
| Oracle: Evaluating Results of the DB System Check | DB16B | |
| Oracle: Checking and Creating CBO Statistics | DB13 | |
| HP-UX: Monitoring File Systems | ST06 | |
| HP-UX: Checking the Operating System Log | (See HP-UX documents) | |
| HP-UX: Checking Swap Space | ST06 | |
| Weekly | SAP: TEMSE Check | SP12 |
| Oracle: Searching for Missing Indexes | DB02 | |
| Oracle: Database Verification – Checking Physical Structure | sapdba | |
| HP-UX: File System Backup | tar | |
| Monthly | SAP: Changing Administrator Passwords | SU01 |
| Oracle: Analyzing the Entire Database | analyze.cmd | |
| Oracle: Changing the Database Administrator Password | svrmgr30 | |
| Unscheduled/occasional | SAP: Checking the Transport Management System (TMS) | STMS |
| SAP: Deleting Old User Master Records | SU01 | |
| SAP: Changing Administrator Passwords | SU01 | |
| SAP: Checking User Activities | SM04 | |
| SAP: Scheduling Jobs | SM36 | |
| Oracle: Extending the Database (Adding Data Files) | sapdba |
Note
CCMS stands for Computer Center Management System. As shown in Screen 13.22, CCMS itself collects together many monitoring tasks.
Each monitoring task in Screen 13.21 has three icons. Table 13.3 describes how to use these icons.
SCREEN 13.22
| Name | Icon | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Documentation | Click this icon to open a help file about this monitoring task. | |
| Execute | Click this icon to start the monitoring task. | |
| Status | The task has not been started. This icon will change to |
For example, if we click
SCREEN 13.23
From this screen, we can monitor the following items:
- Background Processing, which includes background work processes and background jobs.
- Buffers, which include memory buffers for SAP objects, such as programs, table definitions, and table entries.
- Change and Transport System, which includes the object export/import and transport environment.
- Communications, which include gateway services, ALE (Application Link Enabling), and transactional RFC (Remote Function Call). BEx requires gateway services to communicate with an SAP application server. BW requires ALE and transactional RFC to communicate with its R/3 source systems.
- Data Archiving, which was introduced in BW 3.0A and is not available in 2.0B.
- Database, which includes space, performance, and backup/restore operations.
- Dialog Overview, which includes dialog response time and network time.
- Entire System, which duplicates other functions listed here.
- Operating System, which includes the file systems, CPU, paging, swap space, and LAN.
- Security, which includes security checks and audit logs of CPI-C (Common Programming Interface – Communications) and RFC logons.
- Spool System, which includes spool work processes and the spool queue length.
- System Log.
Now that we know how to monitor a BW system and measure its performance, we can examine techniques to improve query performance and load performance.