End-To-End Trace Analysis, or Getting to the Bottom of Hybrid Landscape Issues

WHAT?

Let’s assume the following:

You’ve expanded your on-premise SAP-based landscape by connecting it in the SAP Cloud Platform (or vice versa). Using this new hybrid setup, you aspire to tackle any situations your users are faced with, and then some.
Understandably, the number of user actions and requests increase, too. Soon you start noticing the occasional performance degradation.

In the above example, any element can contain the cause of the performance bottleneck.
To have the info required for an appropriate resolution, you need a tool to trace your request across all landscape layers. In other words, troubleshooting becomes a hybrid task, and it requires a new, hybrid, solution.

NOW WHAT?

You search around and discover that we at SAP have a native free-of-charge solution that fits the bill. Enter E2E Tracing.

It’s a tool for integration monitoring, event monitoring, and exception management. In other words, it’s designed to follow a business interaction everywhere – in all layers of a hybrid landscape – while also log all the timings it took in each layer of the topology.

THEN WHAT?

So what do you need to do to employ the End-to-End trace analysis?
You can find the technical prerequisites and steps you might have to employ for your concrete situation here, but still – the generic procedure outline is the following:

1. Configure SAP Solution Manager man as described
2. Start the End-to-end trace analysis.
3. Go about your usual business process at a pace that avoids overlapping of the operations you perform (or maybe the colleague, whose transaction you want do gather data for). When done with a step, wait a little bit. A popup will appear, asking you if you want to continue the trace. Choose OK to continue.
4. Once the process is finished, stop the trace.
5. Gather and analyze the data, and decide on your improvement.

TECHNICAL DETAILS

The process that takes place is outlined in the following graphic.
There are three phases in the E2E trace analysis procedure – collecting, processing and exposing the data so that necessary actions can be taken.

When the request for monitoring an HTML5 or Java app is initiated, the collection of statistics begins in the runtime. That collected data by E2E trace analysis is placed in a local file.

Once collecting is completed, the file is sent to the SAP Cloud Platform logging infrastructure, where it is processed and stored.

Finally, by employing a dedicated End-to-End Trace Analysis REST API, system administrators can collect and explore the results into SAP Solution Manager or Focused Run. The collected info looks something like this:

This is a summary of the entire process, where you are presented with the timings for each step, and their distribution by type and landscape component. You can also view that info in several additional ways – for example as a Call Tree, a Call Chart, or by system topology, too, as shown below:

FINAL WORDS and REFERENCES

So this is how we can improve the monitoring in your hybrid landscape. If you want to employ our E2E trace analysis, give it a try at your convenience – you won’t be disappointed.

REFERENCES

Short introduction video on the topic
Setting Up the End-To-End Trace Analysis
E2E Trace involving SAP Cloud Platform