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Page 1: Veritas SAP Testing

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SAMPLE WHITE PAPER

T U T O R I A L : W H I T E P A P E R

VERITAS i3

for SAP

APPLICATION PERFORMANCEMANAGEMENT – VERITAS i3 FORSAP

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Copyright 2002 VERITAS Software Corporation. All rights reserved. VERITAS, VERITAS Software, the VERITAS logo, and all other VERITAS product names and slogans are trademarks or registered trademarks of VERITAS Software Corporation in the US and/or other countries. Other product names and/or slogans mentioned herein may be t rademarks or registeredtrademarks of their respective companies. Specifications and product offerings subject to change without notice. June 2002.

1. Executive Summary ....................................................................................................................................................2. Introduction..................................................................................................................................................................3. The Typical Environment ............................................................................................................................................4. Challenges Managing the Environment......................................................................................................................

5. The VERITAS i

3

Methodology.....................................................................................................................................6. VERITAS i3..................................................................................................................................................................

6.1 The Client Web Browser Component ..................................................................................................................6.2 The Network Component.....................................................................................................................................6.3 Web Server Component ......................................................................................................................................6.4 ITS (Agate) Component.......................................................................................................................................6.5 J2EE Servlets ......................................................................................................................................................6.6 R/3 Application Server Component .....................................................................................................................6.7 Database Component..........................................................................................................................................6.8 Storage Devices Component...............................................................................................................................

7. VERITAS i3

Features..................................................................................................................................................7.1 Proactive Management Through Exceptions.......................................................................................................7.2 End-user Experience and SLAs...........................................................................................................................7.3 Correlated End-to-End View................................................................................................................................7.4 Understanding and Correlating SAP WAS Activity..............................................................................................7.5 Investigating the SAP R/3 Application Tier..........................................................................................................7.6 Investigating the SAP Database Tier...................................................................................................................7.7 Long-Term Analysis.............................................................................................................................................

8. Putting All the Pieces Together – A Typical Scenario................................................................................................9. Benefits of VERITAS i

3...............................................................................................................................................

10. Summary..................................................................................................................................................................

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Copyright 2002 VERITAS Software Corporation. All rights reserved. VERITAS, VERITAS Software, the VERITAS logo, and all other VERITAS product names and slogans are trademarks or registered trademarks of VERITAS Software Corporation in the US and/or other countries. Other product names and/or slogans mentioned herein may be t rademarks or registeredtrademarks of their respective companies. Specifications and product offerings subject to change without notice. June 2002.

 1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARYSAP R/3 (SAP) customers can now access their traditional SAP system using a web browser either through thecurrent Internet Transaction Server (ITS) or the version 6.20 Web Application Server (WAS). Application PerformancManagement in these environments is more challenging due to the number of technologies involved, multiple pointsof failure and the increased number of components to manage.

The major challenge facing SAP administrators today is defining a systematic process to understand applicationbehavior, usage patterns, service levels and alerts. This challenge becomes even greater with the introduction of SAP technologies like ITS and application servers.

These new technologies demand more knowledge, understanding, responsiveness, and around-the-clock highperformance than their less complex, traditional SAP applications in order to adhere to service level commitments amaintain end-user productivity. Experienced SAP personnel recognize the need to include Application PerformanceManagement best practices throughout the entire application life cycle.

 Another significant challenge is measuring the actual service being delivered to the end-user and then being able to

determine the end-to-end service level contributors. These measurements are needed to make the appropriatetuning, design or architectural changes, as well as integrating the SAP applications with other legacy or `third partyapplications.

The introduction of new technology from SAP and the ensuing complex architecture can impose new challenges onorganizations who wish to upgrade to these newer versions. Should such an upgrade happen, the organization mayassume an upgrade effort equivalent to up to 50% of the initial investment, both in cost and schedule. One of themain challenges in such upgrades is the ability to forecast and plan the infrastructure capacity necessary to track theusage patterns and performance of the old version and be able to compare loads, usage and performance of the neimplementation to the old one, already adopted by the enterprise. Such an effort will result in faster time todeployment, better capacity planning and an overall savings to the upgrade process budget.

VERITAS i3

for SAP (VERITAS i3) is the industry’s first solution that provides the means to quickly and efficiently

capture and correlate SAP application metrics across the whole SAP infrastructure. These metrics include:

• Real user activated SAP web pages and URLs, as well as SAP R/3 transactions

• Real end user service and response Time

• Network time and availability of remote geographical locations

• Response time and availability of your company’s functional organizations.

• Invoked J2EE servlets running on the SAP WAS

• SAP R/3 transactions and screen numbers

• SAP Application modules

• SAP Users

• Database SQL statements

• Activities introduced by external RFC calls.

VERITAS i3presents these important metrics in a manner that enables crisp communication along with rapid

detection, correction, and verification throughout the application life cycle. This paper describes this unique approac

2. INTRODUCTIONThe introduction of components like ITS and WAS enable users to access the traditional SAP system from anywherusing a web browser. For the end-user, it means more functionality and convenience, but for SAP administrators anBASIS teams, it means more responsibility and complexity. In such environments, Application PerformanceManagement is a vital necessity.

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Copyright 2002 VERITAS Software Corporation. All rights reserved. VERITAS, VERITAS Software, the VERITAS logo, and all other VERITAS product names and slogans are trademarks or registered trademarks of VERITAS Software Corporation in the US and/or other countries. Other product names and/or slogans mentioned herein may be t rademarks or registeredtrademarks of their respective companies. Specifications and product offerings subject to change without notice. June 2002.

 Many problems can occur in a complex environment – either in the network, the web access components, the SAPapplication server, the database, or the storage devices. To make the situation worse, problems tend to beinconsistent (i.e. they can appear and disappear) or can occur only when a certain load is reached. Managing these

environments is challenging.

It is crucial to run 24x7 health checks for notification of potential problems before end-users are affected. It isimportant to understand the application behavior and the usage of the organization from a performance point of viewto verify that business objectives are met, find where bottlenecks are, and the required next step to fix them.

Often, companies rush to finish the SAP implementation phase—which includes customizations and changes—andpay less attention to performance issues, scalability and load. After the system goes ‘live’ and performance problembegin, it is most expensive to fix them.VERITAS has developed an Application Performance Management solution for SAP (VERITAS i

3) that monitors the

entire SAP infrastructure, including the new web application components introduced in version 6.20.

3. THE TYPICAL ENVIRONMENTThere are three main typical SAP environments. The first, and most traditional one, comprises of a MicrosoftWindows client running an SAP GUI connected directly to SAP application servers. SAP application servers connecto the database in order to fetch relevant data.

The second one (Figure 1) introduces a component called Internet Transaction Server (ITS). Users are connected tothe SAP system through a web browser. Requests come in to a web server, are routed to the ITS (Agate), andtranslated there into traditional SAP requests (DIAG or RFC protocol) before being submitted to the R/3 system.Responses are sent back the reverse way—to the client in HTML format. All ITS translation between HTML and SAprotocol is transparent to the end-user.

Figure 1. SAP R/3 system with ITS

There can be multiple web servers and ITS gateways depending on the configuration. Since the ITS keeps the userstate, load-balancing of incoming requests must make sure that once a user has connected through one of the ITSgateways, following requests should continue to go through the same ITS gateway.

The third configuration (Figure 2), introduced in SAP version 6.20, replaces ITS with a J2EE-based Web ApplicationServer (WAS). It introduces new technologies like Java servlets running in a J2EE server (In-Q-My). In this

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Copyright 2002 VERITAS Software Corporation. All rights reserved. VERITAS, VERITAS Software, the VERITAS logo, and all other VERITAS product names and slogans are trademarks or registered trademarks of VERITAS Software Corporation in the US and/or other countries. Other product names and/or slogans mentioned herein may be t rademarks or registeredtrademarks of their respective companies. Specifications and product offerings subject to change without notice. June 2002.

configuration, a web browser connects to SAP WAS. The WAS anticipates the request and forwards it to the JavaServer Pages layer (JSPs), which in turn connects to the SAP application server through SAP Java connector. TheSAP Java connector makes use of RFC calls to interact with SAP application server. SAP application server connecto the database to fetch the required data. Responses are sent back the reverse way, from SAP back to the JSP and

to the user.

Figure 2. Information flow in SAP Version 6.20 

The entire architecture with the different tiers, web browser, network, SAP web application server, SAP applicationserver and the database is shown in the Figure 3.

Figure 3. Entire multi-tier architecture in SAP Version 6.20 

This new generation of SAP adds new technologies and functionality as well as new problems to manage. Managing

traditional SAP application servers and database activity requires a lot of skill, tools, and experience. With theintroduction of new web and Java components, the management tasks become more difficult.

4. CHALLENGES MANAGING THE ENVIRONMENTThe management of SAP, spread across multiple tiers, makes it extremely difficult to pinpoint the source of aperformance problem. There are significant challenges to managing these environments, including:

• Defining, measuring, and committing to organizational business objectives and SLAs, as actually be activated bythe real organization users, from multiple geographic locations

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Copyright 2002 VERITAS Software Corporation. All rights reserved. VERITAS, VERITAS Software, the VERITAS logo, and all other VERITAS product names and slogans are trademarks or registered trademarks of VERITAS Software Corporation in the US and/or other countries. Other product names and/or slogans mentioned herein may be t rademarks or registeredtrademarks of their respective companies. Specifications and product offerings subject to change without notice. June 2002.

• Finding the SAP users, transactions, application modules, programs, functions, and screens that impact theperformance and those that are most easily influenced by performance degradation

• Defining baselines of normal and abnormal application and usage behavior 

• A comprehensive, yet straightforward, way to measure the user’s experience

• Identifying problem patterns and characteristics before the user is affected• Proactively, through alerts, assuring that satisfactory service levels are maintained

• Maintaining historical data for trending, exception and capacity planning analysis

• 24x7, real-time, low-overhead collection and correlation of performance metrics across the SAP infrastructure

• Correlating SAP application metrics like user activated URLs, invoked J2EE servlets, called JCO APIs to SAPapplication server, and database SQL statements across the whole SAP infrastructure

• The ability to break down response times by tier and application component to determine the amount of time spenin each component

• Determining the time spent in Java vs. ABAP vs. SQL statement processing

• Presenting one integrated correlated view of all SAP infrastructure components, from the web user, through thenetwork, SAP WAS, traditional SAP application server, database, and storage devices

• Ability to focus on SAP application server bottlenecks like waiting for a work process, memory issues, inefficientdatabase access, high CPU utilization, etc.

• Tracking the performance of local and remote geographical locations• Coping with unpredictable load periods and handling massive transaction/data volumes

• Aiding SAP basis administrators in analyzing performance issues and suggest remedies

These challenges are not covered by system management frameworks, or by traditional tools—which only takeuncorrelated snapshots from various servers along the SAP application infrastructure.

System management frameworks focus on system parameters, availability, and utilization. Their primary focus ismonitoring the system and the system elements’ health. Frameworks are well suited for detecting system level andnetwork issues such as servers and applications with high utilization, high packet rates, and numerous retries.Unfortunately, frameworks don’t focus on the end-user experience, transactions and usage. Therefore, if all systemparameters look OK, how can we tell why location X suffers from poor response-time, or why certain SAP URLs areslow?

The “stovepipe approach”, which takes isolated snapshots form various servers, does not resolve the problem eitheSnapshots provide very coarse information consisting of generic statistics taken from each tier separately. For example, you can look at Java servlets, SAP application servers, or Oracle metrics and still not understand whichcomponent is causing a bottleneck. By following the real end-user transaction across the SAP tiers, snapshots cantell you that the average Java servlets, SAP transaction and SQL response times are OK, but they cannot tell whichSQL statements belong to which transactions and, therefore, cannot help much in isolating the problem.

Traditional SAP tools are limited in their success to meet the performance management challenges of today’sbusiness. Since these tools adopted a “stovepipe approach” they are limited in their ability to correlate performancebetween the different infrastructure components. The additional technologies (e.g. web, Java) being deployed in thelatest release will only compound the problems for these traditional methods. “Stovepipe” solutions force technicalexperts to spend an excessive amount of time correlating multiple metrics to pinpoint the root cause of performance

degradation. Even as traditional tools link various GUI’s to create loosely integrated “suites”, it is still not enough tosolve the problem.

Compounding this issue, many of the data collectors deployed do not sample frequently enough (e.g. once every 5-minutes) and as a result, they rarely gather enough information to perform meaningful analysis. Performanceproblems are the toughest and most costly to pinpoint and resolve. This is particularly true if the tools used do notcollect enough of the necessary information.

Metrics for end-to-end application analysis must be captured with agents having application knowledge and visibilityand those that reflect the user experience. Real-time performance metrics should be collected 24x7, with extreme

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Copyright 2002 VERITAS Software Corporation. All rights reserved. VERITAS, VERITAS Software, the VERITAS logo, and all other VERITAS product names and slogans are trademarks or registered trademarks of VERITAS Software Corporation in the US and/or other countries. Other product names and/or slogans mentioned herein may be t rademarks or registeredtrademarks of their respective companies. Specifications and product offerings subject to change without notice. June 2002.

efficiency and low over head and correlated across the SAP infrastructure path to enable problem isolation and rootcause identification.

 Additionally, historical information must be kept for long-term analysis, exceptions, baselines, trends, and capacity

planning. Using historical data, we can calculate typical SAP behavior—for example, there may be peaks eachMonday morning for some transactions. Knowledge of typical behavior facilitates generating exceptions for abnormabehavior and setting the right SLA thresholds. This information also helps calculate database table growth—allowingus to allocate enough space in advance of a slowdown or create appropriate indexes to reduce the fetch times.

In short, typical infrastructure frameworks provide important system and network management bottoms-up detail, budo not look at necessary end-user and transaction activity. Traditional tools look at each tier separately—providinggeneric statistics for that tier—but do not perform any correlation between tiers. These approaches lack the power tfind, isolate, and focus on the root cause of the problem or help to identify the real user response-time experience.VERITAS i

3 fills this gap by providing the actual user experience and application end-to-end response-time

contribution detail. This enables SAP administrators to “see” how their applications are performing from theperspective of their users and to correlate that experience to the underlying application components in terms of end-to-end performance.

5. THE VERITAS i3 METHODOLOGYIt is vital for all organizations to understand the importance of a systematic approach to coping with performanceproblems, and to realize the inherent ineffectiveness of ad-hoc problem solving. The foundation of the VERITAS i

solution is a proven methodology designed to facilitate the rapid detection, isolation, analysis, correction andverification of application performance problems. All organizations can benefit from the discipline that VERITAS i

brings to the Application Performance Management process.

The VERITAS Application Performance Management methodology comprises of five stages:

•  Detect – Proactively identify the symptoms that could indicate a performance problem

•  Find – Identify the problematic tier and application component

•  Focus – Discover the root cause of the problem

•  Improve – Take the steps required to improve performance

•  Verify – Make sure the steps taken have achieved the desired goal

These stages combine to form a process that provides a systematic approach to finding and resolving all kinds of performance issues—both predictable and unforeseen.

For example, the methodology begins with an automated proactive detection (Detect) through baselines and SLAs,using the product’s alert capabilities. Alerts can be directed to the appropriate infrastructure framework, organizationor person based on what was detected.

Depending on the issue detected, the SAP BASIS Application Manager can view the application, end-to-end, andisolate (Find) the problematic tier and application component that is the source of the degradation. Problems could caused by network delays, long-running servlets, RFC calls, long-running transactions on the R/3 application serveror long database access times. The process of finding the problematic component is end-user focused, so that weactually follow the end-user transaction from the time it was activated by the user.

 After finding the problematic component, an in-depth analysis of that component is in order to focus on the root-causof the problem (Focus). For example, after finding that SAP application server is the problematic component, wewould like to understand who are the top-heavy users and transactions, whether it is because of a long queue waittime for a work process or application processing time, or a long database call. Another example, in the case of Javaservlets, we would like to look at the different methods called—including, R/3 JCO (Java connector)—and understanwhether it is because of a specific method or long connection time to the R/3 application server.

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Copyright 2002 VERITAS Software Corporation. All rights reserved. VERITAS, VERITAS Software, the VERITAS logo, and all other VERITAS product names and slogans are trademarks or registered trademarks of VERITAS Software Corporation in the US and/or other countries. Other product names and/or slogans mentioned herein may be t rademarks or registeredtrademarks of their respective companies. Specifications and product offerings subject to change without notice. June 2002.

 After focusing on the problem’s root cause comes the actual fixing of the problem (Improve). For example, allocatinadditional R/3 work processes fixes a long queue time waiting for a work process. Adding an index to a databasetable fixes a long running SQL statement problem.

Once the fix has been applied, we need to ensure that indeed the problem is fixed and will not reappear (Verify).Utilizing long-term information kept in the VERITAS Performance Warehouse, we can examine service times beforeand after the fix has been applied. Doing this shows whether or not we fixed the problem and if service times are asexpected.

6. VERITAS i3 VERITAS i

3 focuses on providing your organization with the ability to completely manage your application

performance end-to-end—including, the browser, the web server, R/3 web application server (which includes J2EEservlets and JCO), R/3 application server, database, and even into the physical storage.

Conceptually, VERITAS i3

is composed of Insight, Indepth and Inform functionality. Figure 4 below depicts thearchitectural components.

Figure 4.  Architectural Components of VERITAS i 3 

VERITAS Insight provides the agents and logic required to enable your IT organization to see the end-to-endresponse time contributions across the client, network, R/3 WAS, R/3 application server, and database server and toisolate the components which are responsible for slowdowns. The process starts by measuring the actual web-user 

response time at the application, transaction, or page level. Then, upon detection of a response time objective or baseline breach, the problematic tier and component are found, as described earlier in the methodology section.

VERITAS Indepth provides in-depth drill-downs to identify the root cause of problems. It collects and correlatesdetailed component information (e.g. SAP application server utilization and workload, top-heavy transactions, J2EEservlet specific information, methods, Oracle resource consumption breakdown, slowest SQL statements, etc.).

VERITAS Inform provides the real-time alerts that are driven by the baseline and thresholds defined. VERITASInform also includes the reporting components of VERITAS i

3. This rich report capability enables the presentation of

ad hoc and scheduled reports. These reports are useful for service levels, trends, and exceptions.

INFORM .. When?INSIGHT .. Isolates the where/who?INSIGHT .. Isolates the where/who?

Client Network Web Srvrs App Srvrs DB Srvrs Storage

INDEPTH .. Why?INDEPTH .. Why?

Application Response Time Segmentation

Provides the details associated with the underlying

components

Effective

Communication

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Copyright 2002 VERITAS Software Corporation. All rights reserved. VERITAS, VERITAS Software, the VERITAS logo, and all other VERITAS product names and slogans are trademarks or registered trademarks of VERITAS Software Corporation in the US and/or other countries. Other product names and/or slogans mentioned herein may be t rademarks or registeredtrademarks of their respective companies. Specifications and product offerings subject to change without notice. June 2002.

 VERITAS i

3includes the VERITAS Performance Warehouse, which provides the common repository for long-term

history, collected by the different VERITAS agents along the SAP application path (e.g. R/3 WAS, R/3 applicationserver, database, and storage devices.) This facilitates trend analysis, long-term capacity planning, baseline

calculations using historical data and correlated reports over time.

VERITAS i3includes all necessary functionality to see the actual user’s response-time and analyze the correlated

contributors from end-to-end. These include:

• The actual service delivered to any SAP user over any given time period

• Discovery and monitoring of all SAP users and the performance of their transactions

• Web server URLs

• J2EE servlet invocations

• Java specific methods invocations, response-times and throughput

• SQL statements activated by specific SAP transactions

• Database resource consumption breakdown and linking of logical database access to physical storage

• SAP R/3 application server metrics: cpu usage, load average, page faults, connected users, active users

The remainder of this section provides more detail on the functionality and data entities collected from each tier andcomponent across SAP application infrastructure.

Figure 5. Collection and correlation of performance metrics across SAP architecture

 As mentioned earlier, collection of data at each tier by itself is not sufficient. Collected data must be correlated 

across tiers to isolate performance problems by application components (e.g. web browser, network, R/3 WAS, R/3 AS, database, and storage.) Further, in many cases, there are multiple SAP versions with heterogeneousarchitectures interacting with each other. These systems may include the traditional SAP R/3 fat client, ITS, and thenew WAS architecture. It is therefore important to correlate performance data not only between internal tiers, but alsbetween mutltiple external SAP systems as well. The expandable scope of the VERITAS i3 solution allows it to adaand monitor these SAP environments as they grow and connect with new technologies.

Correlation

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Copyright 2002 VERITAS Software Corporation. All rights reserved. VERITAS, VERITAS Software, the VERITAS logo, and all other VERITAS product names and slogans are trademarks or registered trademarks of VERITAS Software Corporation in the US and/or other countries. Other product names and/or slogans mentioned herein may be t rademarks or registeredtrademarks of their respective companies. Specifications and product offerings subject to change without notice. June 2002.

 6.1 THE CLIENT WEB BROWSER COMPONENTThe way to measure service level objectives is from the end-user point of view, at the browser level, measuring realSAP activity response-times. VERITAS has developed a unique technology that sends a tiny piece of code that is

attached to each web page and monitors the end-user performance from the end-user browser—collectingperformance metrics 24X7 from all users. No installation is required at the end-user desktop.

Main data entities collected by this component include:

• Response-time, which is composed of the time from first byte through rendering time

• Service Level Objectives – both warning and critical

• SAP transactions as activated by the real user 

• Business groups and functions

• Location origin the SAP transaction was activated from

There are many additional collected data entities like connection type (LAN vs. dial-up), protocol type (HTTP vs.HTTPS), etc.

6.2 THE NETWORK COMPONENTVERITAS i

3 monitors the network response times for SAP clients at different geographical locations. This enables

problem detection of remote users and sites as well as differentiation between front-end network time and back-endtime. (Back-end time refers to the components from the web server to the database.)

Main data entities collected by this component include:

• Client IP network addresses

• Request service times

• Front-end network time vs. R/3 back-end time differentiation

• Number of requests and throughput

• Number of bytes sent/received

• Response-time to remote geographical locations

6.3 WEB SERVER COMPONENT At the web server tier, VERITAS i

3measures URL response times. It is important to understand which URLs are the

heaviest ones from a response-time perspective, as well as the top URLs from a resource consumption perspectiveIn SAP 6.20 the web server component comes as part of the WAS. It is also important to understand that the abovementioned information is valuable only when one can effectively correlate the SAP Transaction activated from theWeb browser with its underlying URLs and Network activities. This is only a piece of what VERITAS i3 delivers in thSAP environment

Main data entities collected by this component include:

• URL service times (time to retrieve a specific URL by the web server and the back-end system)

• Web server machines and web server instances

• Domains

• URL file types• Client IP address requesting the URL

• Response-time to remote geographical locations

6.4 ITS (AGATE) COMPONENTIt is important to understand how much time is spent at the ITS (Agate) tier—where translation between web requesare translated to traditional SAP requests (DIAG or RFC). This is done by measuring incoming and outgoing traffic tthe ITS gateway. Along with information that is collected at the R/3 application server, we can understand if the ITS the bottleneck

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Copyright 2002 VERITAS Software Corporation. All rights reserved. VERITAS, VERITAS Software, the VERITAS logo, and all other VERITAS product names and slogans are trademarks or registered trademarks of VERITAS Software Corporation in the US and/or other countries. Other product names and/or slogans mentioned herein may be t rademarks or registeredtrademarks of their respective companies. Specifications and product offerings subject to change without notice. June 2002.

Main data entities collected by this component include:

• Request/Response service times

• Number of requests

• Throughput

6.5 J2EE SERVLETSSAP runs its JSPs on the WAS, which is Java enabled. It is important to analyze servlet activity to find potentialslowdowns.

Main data entities collected by this component include:

• JVM data

• HTTP service requests

• Servlet response time and throughput

• The activated SAP R/3 server methods through the RFC call, along with requested parameters

• Drill-down and correlation of called methods

• JDBC request response-time and SQL statements in case of a direct access to the database

• CPU time, JVM Memory garbage collectors, App server metrics

6.6 R/3 APPLICATION SERVER COMPONENTThe R/3 application server, where SAP transactions are executed, plays a key role in the SAP architecture. Atransaction being executed can have several potential performance problems at the application server, starting fromwaiting for the dispatcher and work process, continuing with internal SAP waits and ending with long database accetimes. It is important to continuously monitor the system for performance degradations.

Main data entities collected by this component include:

• SAP users and transactions

• Work types: dialogs and batch

• Transaction processing times, wait times, and DB access times

• R/3 application modules

• R/3 program and functions• Workload information and availability metrics

It is possible to view the information and performance effects by different categories like R/3 systems, organizationabusiness units, locations, and application servers.

6.7 DATABASE COMPONENTThe R/3 application server uses the database to access required business information. An un-tuned database couldcause a lot of performance problems. It is important to continuously monitor the database and collect the rightperformance metrics. It is equally important to analyze the R/3 database access and see if we can improve itsperformance.

Main data entities collected by this component include:• Database resource consumption breakdown (CPU, I/O, Buffer waits, etc)

• Database users, programs, and objects

• Executed SQL statements

• Data Base objects, internal locks and events as accessed by ABAP/SQLstatements as well as their performance

• SAP users and transactions issuing the SQL requests

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Copyright 2002 VERITAS Software Corporation. All rights reserved. VERITAS, VERITAS Software, the VERITAS logo, and all other VERITAS product names and slogans are trademarks or registered trademarks of VERITAS Software Corporation in the US and/or other countries. Other product names and/or slogans mentioned herein may be t rademarks or registeredtrademarks of their respective companies. Specifications and product offerings subject to change without notice. June 2002.

It is important to emphasize the link between problematic SQL statements and their initiating SAP users andtransactions. This enables us to find the users that execute resource-consuming transactions at the database level.

6.8 STORAGE DEVICES COMPONENT

One of the primary reasons of performance problems has always been caused by inefficiently accessing physicaldevices. Problems could be of several types, (e.g. non-well balanced files on devices, contention between files on thsame device, etc.). We would like to map logical database objects access to physical devices in order to understandI/O device access problems. Mapping logical Oracle I/O requests to physical storage devices becomes more crucialin RAID-based architectures where a file can spread over multiple physical devices, using striping techniques.VERITAS has developed mapping to EMC Symmetrix devices, HP XP and Hitachi LightPoint and IBM ESS Sharkdevices.

7. VERITAS i3 FEATURES

The StartPoint screen enables full end-to-end view of the SAP environment—including, the web client, the webapplication server which includes the web server component and the J2EE servlets, R/3 application server, and thedatabase . StartPoint provides an alert overview of the different components by category, in a simplified way to

facilitate the communication of team members, e.g. performance or load alerts at the database. The next step is tolaunch one of the VERITAS i

3components (Insight, Indepth, Inform).

 A typical scenario could start with a user launching VERITAS Indepth for SAP to get an overall view of his SAPenvironment or proactively receiving an alert indicating that a service level threshold has been exceeded. Long-termtrend analysis and top resource-consumers could be easily obtained through reports using long-term metrics storedthe Performance Warehouse.

Figure 6. Startpoint Screen with two SAP WAS enabled environments, one standard R/3 environment and anEnterprise Portal environment  

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7.1 PROACTIVE MANAGEMENT THROUGH EXCEPTIONSManaging a large SAP application infrastructure with hundreds/thousands of users is difficult, to say the least. Theonly way to do so is to work proactively rather than reactively. VERITAS i

3provides the way to do so through the use

of exceptions, based on automatically computed SLAs and baselines. Once an exception is detected by Veritas i3,

the user is alerted about this normative deviation. In addition Veritas i3 will provide capacity trending that will alert thuser should future unforeseen loads and performance issues impact the overall SLA and performance. The graphicsbelow show an alert generated on a SAP transaction code breaching the SLA.

Figure 7. Performance Alert generated on a CRM system

Figure 8. Alert detail screen shows SAP transaction code VA01breaching the SLA

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7.2 END-USER EXPERIENCE AND SLASEnd-user satisfaction is extremely important. If end-users are satisfied, application managers are satisfied. VERITASi3provides a way to measure response-times as experienced by end-users and to define SLA thresholds on those

metrics.

Figure 9. Example of Dashboard view with an availability compliance breach

7.3 CORRELATED END-TO-END VIEWLaunching VERITAS Insight provides an end-to-end overview of the different tiers and components. This view iscorrelated across components, which means you would be able to view for example the J2EE servlets invoked by aspecific URL or SQL statements executed by a specific user or transaction. The graphic below shows an example o

an Insight overview screen for a multi-tier SAP environment.

Figure 10. Example overview screen

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On the upper left hand side, Service Time Comparison, we see the different tiers for Web, J2EE, R/3, and Oracle. this example we can identify the Web tier as the main contributor to response time (bars in this chart are cumulativeJust below we can see the SAP application App Tiers Data Flow, from the web server to the database.

The center part of the screen displays the main data entities for the selected component. For the web server it wouldbe URLs, for J2EE servlets, for SAP application server – transactions running in the application server, for Oracledatabase – SQL statements.

In this case, the main screen is showing the different transactions, users, work types – dialogs, updates andapplication servers. The information is broken by network time, queue time, work time, and database time. Thisprovides us an overview of what is going on in the SAP application servers.

7.4 UNDERSTANDING AND CORRELATING SAP WAS ACTIVITYVERITAS Insight provides us with an end-to-end view as well as segmentation of activity across tiers. Moreover, wecan get high-level details on a tier we would like to focus on.

To explore more on information on J2EE activity within the SAP WAS let’s choose J2EE on the top menu.Performance metrics for the SAP web application server and JVM are displayed.

Figure 11. Example screen of drilling down in J2EE 

We can view the different method invocations. In the screen above we see one method called com.sapmarket. Wecan also see on the left side of the screen details regarding the JVM and its scalability. Scalability means how theweb application server is able to cope with increased load.

More detailed information on the web application tier could be obtained by drilling down into its J2EE component.Drilling down shows the different URLs invoked, their correlation with executed servlets and methods invoked. Byinstrumenting the right J2EE classes we can continue to drill down and view the different methods invoked. One caninstrument the right J2EE classes to the level where the J2EE component calls the SAP application server, the SAPR/3 JCO- Java Connector, and measure the service times serviced by the R/3 application server.

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7.5 INVESTIGATING THE SAP R/3 APPLICATION TIERTo get more detailed information on the SAP R/3 application tier, we can launch the VERITAS Indepth for SAPcomponent. This component provides details on the SAP application server load, availability and response times,broken by systems, locations, organization units, users, transactions, SAP application modules, e.g. SD, FI, etc, by

program names, by screen numbers and more. The next screens present such examples.

Figure 12. In this example we can see SAP R/3 activity broken by Application server. We can also view the numbof transactions and check whether they meet their SLA goal that was defined.

Figure 13. The screen above provides details on the worst performing transactions executed for a specific productsystem.

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For each transaction we can view its network, application and database times as well as its response time vs. apredefined SLA.

Figure 14. This screen presents the top worst performing batch jobs sorted by total duration.

Figure 15. Here is the detail view for a selected batch job. We can see queue time, application time, database time, memory resourcesconsumed and buffer hit ratios for any given batch job. 

Information on additional application server resources could be obtained in a similar way as well as recommendedvalues for important metrics.

7.6 INVESTIGATING THE SAP DATABASE TIER At the database level, detailed resource consumption breakdowns, SQL statements, users, and programs areprovided. Moreover, a unique integration between Indepth for SAP and Indepth for Oracle allows for direct correlatioof the SAP workload from a high-level SLA view all the way down to a sql statement that was executed in thedatabase and even into the underlying storage where the datafile exists. This gives us an understanding of which

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organization or location is responsible for generating poor response time. The graphics below shows a detailedresource consumption view of an SQL statement generated by a SAP application server.

Figure 16. We can see the unique SQL statement generated by a transaction. In this case, the statement shows long Oracle CPU time.

Figure 17. We can see the analyze dates and the history of the execution plan. In this case we see that the timespent in Oracle for this SAP transaction increased after the execution plan changed.

VERITAS i3

also provides a complete database analysis technology that includes “What-If” simulation, SmarTune

recommendation, and an index-tuning advisor which helps in creating indexes as well as simulating the impact of indexes before indexes are actually created.

7.7 LONG-TERM ANALYSISPerformance metrics collected from the client tier, web server, J2EE servlets, SAP application server and thedatabase are kept in the i3 Performance Warehouse. These performance metrics are used for trend analysis andcapacity planning. VERITAS i

3provides a reporting feature called Foresight, which utilizes the Performance

Warehouse to generate hundreds of out-of-the-box Adobe Acrobat reports. The reports range from Exception reportwhich show specific service level breaches, Alert reports which show deviation from nominal behavior, Profile report

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 which enable you to analyze correlated performance data between tiers, Availability reports for both applicationservers and remote locations, and many types of Capacity planning reports that will enable you to plan for the futurebased on past and present trends.

Figure 18. Using VERITAS i 3functionality you can generate hundreds of useful reports right out of the box.

For example, the screen in Figure 18 is a report showing total appserver availability over a period of 7 days. We can

see that for the selected time period, the CRM system has mostly remained above the Service level threshold for system availability. However, the bottom portion of the report details exactly when downtime occurred and for howlong.

8. PUTTING ALL THE PIECES TOGETHER – A TYPICAL SCENARIONow that we are familiar with VERITAS i

3, let’s look at a typical scenario.

SAP components involved: R/3 and Oracle.

Our scenario starts with a call into the help desk. An SAP user from the Sales Department is complaining about sloresponse time while entering sales orders into the R/3 system. He mentions that he normally receives excellentresponse time and feels that it has gotten worse “in the last few days”. Unfortunately, the user has no quantitative

definition of what “worse” is, so normally our help desk staff would have no idea whether this user’s subjective judgment about response time is better or worse than the companies established Service Level standards. It shouldbe noted that without a solution like i3 in place, the helpdesk individuals’ only recourse is to open a ticket and assignto the SAP Basis team.

In this case, our helpdesk personnel can first refer to a Foresight Exception report (Figure 19) which shows that thisuser has an established baseline dialog response time of .45 seconds, however, in the last few days this has jumpeto over 9 seconds which is an increase of over 2000%.

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 Figure 19. Foresight “Exception” report for a top SAP user..

 At this point it is most likely that our Helpdesk individual would still open a ticket and forward this to the Basis team. is important to note, however, that this particular issue has already been through one level of triage. Had the users’response time been within the Service Level threshold, the Helpdesk could have taken care of the issue.

Upon receiving the trouble ticket, the Basis team views the user’s exception report and utilizes i3’s in-context launchcapability (the link in the upper right hand corner of the exception report) to automatically start Indepth for SAP takinus directly to the time period and transaction in question.

Figure 20. High dialog response time for a specific transaction

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 Looking more closely at the previous screen, we can see that this user has a high transaction load and recently hasbeen spending a larger amount of time waiting on the database to fulfill his requests.

Figure 21. Graph shows recent increase in database response time.

Now that we know that the users’ response time increase is due to a poor performing transaction in the database, wcan begin exploring the problem in the database tier. Once again, with the integration available in i3 for SAP, we calaunch Indepth for Oracle carrying the context of our current investigation into the database tier.

Figure 22. Use VERITAS Indepth for Oracle to examine the SQL statements of the SAP transaction and its histor

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The previous screen reveals that the sql statement that is associated with our poor performing transaction has veryhigh I/O Wait Time. We can drill down further to the spindle level to investigate why exactly the i/o contention istaking place or how other storage related problems might be involved in the problem.

Figure 23. Using VERITAS i 3’s Indepth for Oracle to Investigate a sql statement.

To summarize, i3 began from a static high-level user report which indicated extremely high end-user response time.We launched our investigation in-context through the R/3 architecture including both the application server tier andthen into Oracle. We found that the users’ primary workload over the last 10 days included a very poorly performingtransaction in the last 2 days. Further, this transactions poor response time was directly attributed to poor databaseresponse time. The database problem was narrowed down to high database i/o wait times.

In order to investigate the above problems we had to have the knowledge of correlating SAP R/3 all the way from th

SAPGUI client through to the database and even into the storage array. We also had to correlate SAP transactionswith invoked SQL statements. Having this information is fundamental for segmenting a response time problem acrosthe various SAP tiers.

9. BENEFITS OF VERITAS i3 From a business perspective, using VERITAS i

3can significantly reduce performance slowdowns, achieving rapid

Return On Investment (ROI) while maintaining low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

VERITAS i3

significantly helps organizations to:

• Understand who is using SAP, which applications and transactions are being used, when, and where

Proactively detect potential problems before they negatively impact end-users• Improve end-user satisfaction with the application

• Increase ROI - detect, find and solve problems quicker 

• Reduce TCO – significantly reduce the amount of staff, time, and effort involved in the problem managementprocess. It also enables less experienced people to isolate and solve problems quickly

• Verify adherence to business level objectives

• Conduct organizational health checks through baselines and service level exceptions

• Effectively communicate the service level achievements and improvements to the organization

• Eliminate “blamestorming” between IT organizations

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• Manage and tune the application to effectively utilize system resources

• Use just-in-time capacity, deferring equipment and associated software licenses and support costs until they areactually needed

• Better understand future capacity requirements, based on current SAP usage and growth patterns

In summary, VERITAS i3

is an excellent vehicle to measure and improve performance objectives, providing all thenecessary mechanisms to realize significant savings in cost and effort while effectively managing applicationperformance.

10. SUMMARYManaging SAP performance is a challenge that requires a unique solution. SAP has become an essential part of many organizations—this trend continues to grow with the introduction of Netweaver, which involves newtechnologies like non-ITS web access and Java. While this is a great advance for end-users—improving businessefficiency, productivity, and satisfaction—it poses great challenges for SAP administrators and others that areresponsible for the smooth management of these complex applications.

Experience has shown a direct correlation between provided service levels, productivity (internal) and revenuegeneration (external). There is also a direct correlation of expenses incurred to achieve required service levels. Thepenalty for not meeting the users’ performance expectations may mean loss of business, loss of opportunity andfailure to realize a ROI for the effort and operational expenses.

Delivering the right level of service has become very challenging. Managing the new SAP architecture isfundamentally more difficult due the inherent complexity introduced by multiple tiers, a mixture of new and oldtechnologies in the path (e.g. J2EE servlets and RFC function calls to traditional SAP basis technology), as well asdatabase calls and storage access. VERITAS i

3 addresses these challenges and actually simplifies the deployment and ongoing maintenance of SAP

systems. Using VERITAS i3

helps companies manage service levels, contain costs, and maximize the efficiency of operational investments.

VERITAS i3 is the industry’s first solution that provides a way to quickly and efficiently capture and correlate SAPapplication metrics like URLs, J2EE servlets, JCO, RFC calls, application server transaction activity, and SQLstatements across the SAP infrastructure. It presents these important metrics in a manner that enables crispcommunication, rapid proactive or reactive detection, correction and verification throughout the application life cycle

VERITAS i3 sets a new milestone in SAP performance management by delivering a comprehensive integrated

software solution that addresses the major challenges associated with the management of SAP multi-tier applicationcomponents.

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VERITAS Software CorporationCorporate Headquarters350 Ellis StreetMountain View, CA 94043650-527-8000 or 866-837-4827

For additional information aboutVERITAS Software, its products, or thelocation of an office near you, please callour corporate headquarters or visit our Web site at www.veritas.com.