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 to get basic ideas about what this tool is and how it works.

 

 

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 in Screen 13.19 to reach Screen 13.21.

 

 

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).

Table 13.2. SAP-RECOMMENDED SYSTEM MONITORING TASKS

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

Table 13.3. FUNCTION ICONS IN SCREEN 13.21

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 after you click , even though the task has not finished yet.

For example, if we click next to SAP: CCMS System Monitoring (General Monitoring Functions) in Screen 13.21, we get another SAP session (Screen 13.23).

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.