A Workload Primer

Recently, we connected SAP R/3 (or ECC or Business Suite) to BODS (Business Objects Data Services), in parallel to an SAP Business Warehouse instance.  The BW system started at version 2; there are data designs back that far.  BODS is a new install, so we’re reinventing.

One of my tasks is to deliver workload statistics, via trusty ST03 transactions.  In BW, we have extractors that run via a specific user ID. Process chains are initiated by workload automation (using a third party scheduling tool).  BODS is different, but we’ve set up new IDs to track the job runs.  Here’s what I do to see the work done.

If you have authority, you can get to ST03 and see the available workload menus.

Inside, this transaction ran the SAPWL_ST03N report.  So ST03 is really ST03N (“N” for “New”), but there is no way to get to ST03 OLD as far as I know.  The screen above shows remnants of the ECC upgrade, where “620” was the old system.  These may be safely deleted after a decent interval elapses.

I picked “Day” since I am looking for a current run of jobs by a specific user.

The first screen that comes up shows the Workload Overview.  Good meta data; to get to the type of details for a single user, we need to drill further.

Shown above are the results of picking the “Standard” Transaction Profile.  To protect the innocent, some reports and jobs are redacted.

Picking “User Profile” and sorting by the user is a different approach, if we don’t know the transaction name but do have the service user.  In this case, we are looking at BODSDX (an account created for this process).

Double-clicking on the user pops up another menu showing what that user ran.

Going back to the transaction menu, filter on the job names of interest.

The “Filter Criteria” can be wildcards, ranges, single entries, etc.  I typically use a range, depending on the job characteristics.

The result are two batch runs.  The background job indicates the start time as 02:05 and 02:06 on November 4th.

Assuming these are the results we want, dropping these into spreadsheets is a typical way to capture the run times for comparison.  After a certain period, these details are rolled up and/or purged from the SAP repository.

The Export button expands to several download types.  Pick spreadsheet.

In the past, we had XLS format.  Now we have XLSX (though the screen says “XSLX”…).