Slightly distracted by #blogtheft, I dropped this story line momentarily (pause while I proclaim this content copyright 2009 James E. Spath). Back on the line, I want to show the progress on getting to Workload Analysis data, specifically Process Chain run times using ST03.
Part 1
Operator? Support? Hello? No, I don't want to talk to Mr. Veedle.
Part 2
Is This The Party To Whom I Am Speaking?
I did not share the SAP "Service Marketplace" note number earlier, as it was not available. While it probably was a temporary retraction, these things sometimes can disappear and be replaced by other notes. Here it is:
BI Application name missing for 3.X Workbook and Templates
https://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1317483
Not a catchy title, when we're looking for a fix for transaction ST03, nor does the symptom text sound much like our problem:
| When data from RSDDSTAT_OLAP table is extracted [...] the BI Application name is blank for 3.X Workbook and 3.X Web Templates. |
On the other hand, that's the table (or join, to be specific) that was at the heart of the statement last seen when the transaction screen was put on the long hold.
First screen shot
Here's an cropped/edited view of ST03, looking at ST03, after applying the note in our quality system just after a production copyback. So we've got all the data from the 5 weeks after our BW 7 upgrade, and "ta-da" I can look at Process Chains.
If I had shown more of this screen, you'd see Process Chains on the left side, near the bottom, under Analysis Views. The top right would have had both 640 (pre-upgrade) and recent data (post upgrade). That's an artifact of changing the underlying data structures. The main part of the screen shows ST03 for the prior day - I ran this Thursday looking at Wednesday 26-Aug. You'll note that the ST03-within-ST03 shows 17 steps, with a total response time of 53 seconds.
I could not fit all the values on the image, but you should see CPU time was 9 seconds. Quite a contrast to the past few weeks!
The second screen shot is also from our quality system, but it's looking at data generated in the production system. This is the run history for a single process chain over the month of July.
This should tell you why I wanted to look at the ST03 process chain metrics in the first place. I sliced out a couple days in early July (again, to fit the image on screen). The status shows yellow until July 12th. Let's ignore that, and look at the total time, which creeps up to around 13,000 seconds by the time of the BW 7 upgrade. All green until the upgrade. After the system is back. we have alternating red and green, and a few high run times. The 590,000 second run time was either due to resource starvation when everything let loose after the upgrade, or a step failed and was then corrected. We can ignore that if it does not repeat, as post-go-live time can be special.
Note that I sorted this display by Start Date, to be able to easily see status and duration trends.
The last image here is from data pulled on production job run times, using metrics from our enterprise job scheduler (it's not from SAP or its "preferred vendor). I wanted to see the duration pattern of the job I found via ST03 in our quality system, going back several months (okay, 8). As data volumes, contention periods, resource changes and similar factors affect run times, looking at a short time period may lead to mistaken assumptions.
You should be able to tell that this job has very long run times on irregular intervals. However, the base run time has been under 1 hour up until the BW upgrade. It's now closer to 2 hours per day, with many more frequent excursions into the 3 to 4 hour area. I think I'll look at that next.
This series on ST03 is not done yet, but we should be close to moving the "proposed fix" into production. Then I get to help complete the POSITIVE CALL CLOSURE survey. What would your input be for that survey?
