IT Performance Reporting
At Australia Post I am often asked to generate performance reports listing how many people are logged on, how large the databases are and how many CPU we are consuming. Recently, we have been using the Business Warehouse component in Solution Manager to collect, store, and aggregate performance data.
Using BW for IT Performance Reporting allows me to generate a self service approach to producing landscape-wide technical analysis reports and most importantly, removes this responsibility from the Basis Support Staff.
The landscape-wide data required for IT Performance Reporting comes from the following different sources:-
- Performance data from the central performance history (CPH)
- Workload statistics data from monitored systems
- Data from the SAP Early-watch Alert (EWA) report
The old Way.
In the past, we have all relied on that special Basis person who would gladly give up a half day to hammer out performance reports for you - in return for several beers... Worse still, you may be making decisions with old or inaccurate data derived from STAD or ST03G.
The new way.
Solution manager provides streamlined access to system wide performance data from two work centres:-
1. IT Performance Reporting - via the System Adminitration Work Centre
- The system monitoring work centre
- System availability BI Report
- Users logged in BI report
- Database growth BI report
2. Workload Statisitics - via the Root Cause Analysis Work Centre
- The root cause analysis work centre
- Average ABAP response time - time profile
- Average J2EE response time - time profile
Investment.
Establishing IT Performance Reporting is one on the more time cosuming activities in Solution Manager. The following is a generic list of pre-requisites you should fulfil before deploying this functionality:-
- Activating the BW client in Solution Manager
- Ensure all your EWA configuration is up to date
- Ensure your Solution Manager Agents are installed, patched and running
- Applying Solution Manager 7.0 Enhancement Pack 1
- Ensure your hardware is sized to run Solution Manager properly.
Once you have jumped these hurdles, the activation of IT Performance Reporting is a Wizard Based process which will take you around 30 minutes per satellite system.
Savings.
Once configured, the IT Performance History reports are called dynamically based on report templates and query definitions created with the Business Explorer frontend toolset covering:-
- Availability,
- Performance; and
- Utilization
These reports will help to:-
- Analyze performance history trends and forecast availability, performance, and stability problems.
- Provide a basis for accurate capacity management and performance tuning.
- Improve communication of performance metrics to senior managment due to flexible, customized reports and personalized Web reporting in the BW component.
- Improve efficiency due to the linking of reports for drilldown analyses.
- Save the Basis Support staff from the time consuming burden of creating ad-hoc performace reports on the fly.
Show me.
Bonus Information.
- There is no additional licensing fee for the BW usage type in Solution Manager.
- Use transaction CCMSBISUITE for SAPGui HTML control
- Drill-down navigation is supported in all BW reports
- IT Performance Reports in Your Inbox - Stay Informed Any Time, Anywhere
- Displaying Your Own Queries in the IT Performance Reporting
References.
The ALM difficulty rating.
Expertise required. High.
Time taken to deploy. Medium.
Payback time. Slow.
Overall rating. Do it once you have completed ALM teasers 1-4.
You don't have to be a Ninja for ALM Teaser #5, but it helps.
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