ALM functionality teaser #3 Earlywatch Alert Reporting

The measure of any good Support Team is how quickly they react to disruptions in business oprerations. This ALM functionality teaser will demonstrate how you can grant yourself more reaction time by producing an early warning of bottlenecks and potential problems before they become critical.

The SAP Earlywatch Alert (EWA) report is the most efficient mechanism to move the Support Team into proactive mode – and establish themselves as a strategic business asset (and not a unjustified expense)

Historically, SAP used to provide a safeguarding service known as the Earlywatch Check on your Productive system once or twice a year (depending on your maintnenance contract). The Earlywatch report contained a truck-load of vital recommendations which would help improve system performance, postpone a hardware upgrade and even prevent some unforeseen downtime. I remember how much I looked forward to the reports and all the great learnings which they brought.

These days, the Solution Manager system can generate recurring EWA Reports for a single system or for the entire landscape (or Solution), and distribute them to a variety of interested parties – Technical, Functional and Management. The EWA Reports are often some 50 pages thick and contain detailed information which would otherwise take several days to compile manually.

To set up the EWA for a single instance is a straightforward task which will take around one hour per satellite system. This process is well documented in the Service Marketplace and is quite straightforward for a junior Basis technician to follow, see link below.

Assuming you have 40 instances, setting up EWA reports will take you around 1 person week.

Once you are done, you can expect to benefit from the following information:-

• System Configuration
• Performance Overview
• Top 5 transactions
• Security exceptions
• Database Growth
• ST22 short dumps ands errors
• Expensive SQL statements
• Number of transports being imported
• Trend analysis

The EWA reports provide capacity planning and trending information to delay a server upgrade or prevent an outage. At my place, the EWA Report identified transaction ‘SE16’ (table display) as the top CPU hungry transaction in our ERP system. This lead to the re-education of SE16 users resulting in a free capacity upgrade when this behaviour stopped.

We recently deployed BW at our place, and underestimated the database growth rate. The EWA database growth chart gave us an early warning of an impending ‘out of space’ error. We reacted accordingly and prevented a system outage.

We are currently working with the ABAP Development team to address the most inefficient ‘Z’ programs identified by the EWA reports. This initiative is aimed at reducing CPU usage and improving the run-time of our batch stream.

These examples have already saved the company thousands of dollars in business disruptions, and is helping to transform the Support Team from a necessary expense into a valuable Business asset.

Set up your systems in an EWA solution landscape. This will generate a comprehensive report across the whole Productive landscape.

EWA for Solutions provides a link between standard EWAs and individual core business process performance evaluations. See note 1040343

Service Providers can customize EWA reports to include specific information designed to promote a more personal relationship with the customer.

Don’t be surprised if a ‘Very Red‘ EWA for Solution results in a call from the SAP support oraganisation. If installed properly, your Solution Manager system will trigger workflows back into the SAP AGS organisation.

Make sure you distribute the EWA reports automatically to all interested parties. You will find they will become quite a talking point and a great advertisement of Support Team value to the Business.

You can integrate Oracle, BWA, J2EE and BOBJ systems with Solution Manager using EWA.

Without your EWA, do you know where you are?