Many organisations make significant investments in SAP to run their business processes. Realising the expected return on investment requires effective implementation projects to install and customise SAP, and a commensurate effort to ensure optimal performance, availability and usage.
All SAP users in all locations must have the performance and availability needed to get their jobs done efficiently and effectively. On occasion, when performance might be less optimal, users have sometimes relied on traditional manual processes that existed before the application was implemented. This, in turn, can impact the overall return on investment from implementing SAP. However, while some industry monitoring tools claim to monitor, measure and report on the performance of SAP applications, they don’t actually provide insight into performance and availability from the end-user perspective. Meeting the demands of the business means capturing SAP performance in a way that gives a true picture of the end-user experience.
In many businesses, IT operations and application teams struggle to gain visibility into the performance of key end-user transactions from locations that utilise SAP R/3 and NetWeaver. IT is flying blind about what services are being impacted when service performance degrades. This results in time-consuming and ineffective communication across teams to determine what the issues are and to fix problems quickly.
In effect, there are specific questions you need answers to if you are to effectively manage the performance and availability of SAP solutions. These include:
- Are SAP users experiencing performance problems? How many and where?
- What transactions are affected?
- What locations were affected by SAP performance problems? Is the network impacted?
- What tiers of SAP applications are contributing to poor end-user performance?
- How are SAP transactions performing on the application servers? Is the problem in the application logic, the system resources or the database?
- Did a recent SAP transport cause performance issues? Was the ABAP code optimised?
- How are the service level agreements and other support service requirements being monitored and reported?
When IT organisations are faced with a number of simultaneous issues within SAP, they must ensure they focus on the issues that impact the business the most, rather than looking at the issue from an infrastructure perspective. Prioritising issues based on end-user experience measurements enables teams to act quickly to the most pressing business problems first. Having real-time visibility into the information needed to answer these questions is essential to identifying and diagnosing performance problems. Being able to quickly isolate the source of problems is critical, so the right people responsible for the specific tier within the SAP architecture can be quickly notified to tackle problems. This includes insight into the performance of the tiers in the architecture, the health of the components and the application infrastructure that hosts those components.
In addition, IT teams should not stop at the architecture or component level. The network itself is an important factor in this assessment, requiring deep analysis of bandwidth usage or network latency separate from server processing time. Without specific analysis views to drill down into the probable causes of the performance issues, communication across IT and SAP application teams becomes difficult and slows problem resolution. At the same time, all SAP stakeholders need clear visibility into application performance from the end-user’s perspective.
Without visibility there is no way to validate end-user complaints about application ‘slowness’ or check whether performance-tuning efforts bring the desired effect – do they benefit end-users? Furthermore, existing SAP application performance measurements, using internal log data collection methods, do not reflect the end-user experience, but rather the internal interactions of application components.
While SAP applications are constantly evolving, you need to communicate any impacts of application changes in a language business managers understand, not as mysterious T-codes.
Given the variety of technical components, there is a high degree of complexity involved when ensuring a strong SAP performance. However, the technical architecture is only one part; complexity can also be found on the application level.
To help settle the score, you may well want to review solutions which provide the monitoring and views that enable all roles to manage and report information quickly and make the right decisions on business issues that are critical to the bottom line.
Rafi Katanasho is ANZ director, application performance management for Compuware. This article is sponsored by Compuware.
This article was first published in Inside SAP Yearbook 2012 (published September 2011).
