10.2 Daily Load Monitoring
The days of batch processing at night are a distant reality for most twenty-first-century SAP BW/4HANA installations. In most systems, data loads are running around the clock, because users are global, up-to-date information is critical, or volumes are so large that loads can’t be restricted to nighttime operational windows.
As a result, data load monitoring has become a critically important responsibility. In some systems, third-party tools are used to monitor process chains, but in many, no external tools are used and monitoring is conducted within the Data Warehousing Workbench, in which a host of monitors are available to help determine the current operational status, identify data load and SAP BW/4HANA object issues, and facilitate resolution.
In this section, we’ll cover the following daily data load monitoring tasks:
This list is not meant to be comprehensive by any means; each system or implementation may have specific and unique data load monitoring requirements. However, these monitoring tasks represent the minimal list of tasks that should be performed to ensure data is loading successfully into your system. Let’s start by monitoring alerts raised in the CCMS.
10.2.1 Monitor SAP BW/4HANA Computing Center Management System Alerts
The CCMS has an alert monitor to help operate SAP BW/4HANA systems. The CCMS BI Monitor contains a selection of SAP BW/4HANA-relevant monitoring trees for process chains and Transaction RSRV consistency checks. These alerts can be used to provide an overview of related issues in the system.
The monitoring trees in the BI Monitor come standard with the following alerts, as shown in Figure 10.21:
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Process chains
This alert contains all process chains executed in the system since it was last started or, if recently restarted, for up to seven days before the last restart.
Figure 10.21 BW Computing Center Management System (Transaction RSA1)
Note
After a system is restarted, the monitor will contain the last seven days of PC logs before the restart. This setting can be configured by changing the transfer parameter for method execution DAYS_TO_KEEP_LOGS in method definition RSPC_CCMS_STARTUP. Go to the method definition, run Transaction RZ21, and select menu item Methods • Definitions. Once you set the parameter to OFF, process chains won’t be monitored in CCMS.
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Background processing
This alert agent runs every hour and monitors all the batch jobs in the system.Note
The frequency of this agent can be configured by changing the periodicity of batch job SAP_CCMS_MONI_BATCH_DP. By default, it’s scheduled to run hourly, but it can be set to run as frequently as every 10 minutes in Transaction SM37.
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RSRV checks
This alert displays the messages for the consistency checks that have been executed in the analysis and repair environment (Transaction RSRV). The consistency checks must be scheduled manually.
10.2.2 Monitor Process Chains
Although CCMS provides an overview of all process chain runs, from a daily data load monitoring perspective it’s most important to monitor only the last execution of each chain. There’s a process chains monitor in the Data Warehousing Workbench, under Administration. This monitor provides only the current status for each process chain in the system, as shown in Figure 10.22.
Figure 10.22 Process Chain Monitor in Data Warehouse Workbench (Transaction RSA1)
The process chain monitor can also be accessed directly via Transaction RSPCM. Each active process chain in the system will be listed here with a green, yellow, red, or gray status; gray means the chain has never been executed. If the status is yellow, the chain is currently running. The transaction doesn’t distinguish between meta chains and local chains, so all chains will be displayed here.
Filtering the result list by chains with a specific status can be accomplished as shown in Figure 10.23. This can help narrow the focus to find only errors if there are too many chains in the list with another status.
Figure 10.23 Filtering Process Chain Monitor Based on Status (Transaction RSPCM)