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Is your customer planning for SAP S/4HANA Conversion to SAP S/4HANA 1909 or planning for Release Upgrade to S/4HANA 1909 or higher? then are you aware of Silent Data Migration? Do you know how to monitor Silent Data Migration?

In this blog, I will describe how to monitor Silent Data Migration after a S/4HANA 1909 upgrade/conversion.

Before beginning with this blog, if you are not familiar with Silent Data Migration, kindly check my earlier blog Silent Data Migration for S/4HANA 1909 Upgrade/Conversion to understand what is Silent Data Migration (SDM)? How is it enabled? Importance of Silent Data Migration user.

During the S/4HANA upgrade or conversion to target S/4HANA 1909 or higher, Silent Data Migration is used to migrate the application data while the business is on the target release without any disruption.

At the end of the SUM tool process, a background job will be scheduled once you execute the post-upgrade standard program BTCTRNS2, which releases suspended jobs.  This job, SAP_SDM_EXECUTOR_ONLINE_MIGR, starts the execution of the SDMI classes during Business uptime. The job repository for Silent Data Migration can be observed using transaction SJOBREPO.

Monitoring the silent data migration is very important since you cannot continue with the next S/4HANA release upgrade until all SDMs are successfully completed. Hence, monitoring can help to identify failed SDM’s and eventually allow administrators to identify root cause, fix, and resume the failed migration.  Also, monitoring SDM will help us to control resource utilization, managing the number of work processes utilized for the SDM guarantees a smooth data migration while the system is up and business is utilizing the system.



SDM is client dependent since the application data is usually client dependent. Hence, the SAP_SDM_EXECUTOR_ONLINE_MIGR background job will be triggered in each client. The first step in the monitoring is to make sure SAP_SDM_EXECUTOR_ONLINE_MIGR is scheduled & released in all the clients, after the upgrade.


Monitoring Silent Data Migrations

SDM_MON is T-code used for monitoring all SDMs. We can monitor the SDMs of all clients from the transaction SDM_MON.

ollowing is the initial screen of SDM_MON transaction before the program BTCTRANS2 is executed after the upgrade. The initial screen shows all migration classes, status in all clients, and whether they are qualified for online migration in the current release. You can switch between two different settings by selecting the following buttons (only one of them is active at a time)

  1. Show only qualified migration

  2. Show all migrations



 


Once background job SAP_SDM_EXECUTOR_ONLINE_MIGR is started, you will see the job’s status, for each client, in transaction SM37.  The jobs will be executing by the SDM User the SUM tool created or which were created manually.

T-code -> SM37



T-code -> SDM_MON

Below is what the SDM_MON Silent data migration screen looks like when the SDMs are running.  Those migrations in green status represents the SDM Migration is successfully finished in all clients, for that Silent Data Migration Class.  The other status symbol indicates the migration class is waiting for a prerequisite to be fulfilled in one or more clients.

 

If you would like to know what the status column signifies for each migration, a legend can be viewed by selecting the status and click F1 on the keyboard. A popup with information about each status symbol will appear.


Another example with different SAP GUI version



 

In the following overview screen you can find the explanation of SDM Classes that are not qualified for migration in the current S/4HANA 1909 with status – Rhombus sign


Hence, if you click on   button, it will display only relevant migrations which are valid for your current target release of S/4HANA. If you switch to Show Only Qualified Migrations view, the system will memorize your choice the next time you use transaction SDM_MON.  The system will automatically load only the relevant migrations and the same settings previously set will be applied for all views.


Click on to display the detailed progressing status of all migration classes in current client.



Click on to display the detailed progressing status of all migration classes in all clients.



To display the complete status information about one specific migration class in all clients, select the respective migration class, and click on Migration Class in all clients.


Monitoring the Silent Data Migration logs

During my execution of silent data migration, I never encountered a situation where SDM migration failure due to errors. But If it happens, it is important to know where the logs of SDM are saved for analyzing the issue. Monitoring can help you to track SDM’s execution very closely regarding progression. Well, it is not that hard to find out the logs.
Logs of SDM Migration can be found in SLG1 or the simplest way is to double click on the respective SDM class.


Step 1- Simply double click Migration class

Step 2 – You will automatically be redirected to the transaction SLG1 selection screen with the required fields having been auto-populated with the migration class’s values. Just enter the appropriate date and click on execute.


Step 3 –Double click on the log to see details


Records to be processed at first migration run - this is the number of migration records which the SDM finds at the very first attempt to run the migration. This number will never be updated afterward.

Records to be processed at start of migration run - this is the number of migration records found at the start of the current migration attempt.

Records to be processed at end of migration run - this counts the records found at the end of the current migration run. If all goes well, it should be zero.

Since in my example migration class CL_SDM_ACR_ACDOCA_ACRVALDAT does not have any records to process, I took another migration class CL_NGC_CORE_SDM_CLF_HDR as an example.



In the above example, the data objects are split into 43 packages by Parallelization Framework (PFW) for the Migration Class CL_NGC_CORE_SDM_CLF_HDR, with 4 parallel execution.

To check all the logs created during the execution of Silent Data Migration enter * at external ID in the SLG1 initial screen and click on the execute button.



By default, SAP_SDM_EXECUTOR_ONLINE_MIGR job runs every 30 minutes and picks up unfinished SDMI classes and re-triggers the SDM executor. Overall SAP_SDM_EXECUTOR_ONLINE_MIGR batch job only checks and triggers migration using PFW. But, the actual data migration is carried out by the MIGRATE_DATA method of an SDM Migration Class, using the dialog work process in the form of packages/portions.

Hypothetically the SDMs can run for days or even weeks based on the resource availability and amount of data to be migrated. During the event of a system crash or stop/start while the SDM's are executing- SMD's will automatically resume once the system is available again for the normal operations. SAP_SDM_EXECUTOR_ONLINE_MIGR job checks the status of failed SDM and restarts them again.

I hope this blogs will help to monitor the Silent Data Migration!!!
Please open a support ticket under component  “BC-CCM-SDM” with SAP for any issue with Silent Data Migration.

Over all SDM were developed to optimized the technical downtime of S/4HANA sequential release upgrade(Examples S/4HANA 1809 to S/4HANA 1909), eventually to make ZDO possible for S/4HANA sequential release upgrades.
To further reduce technical downtime for an upgrade from S/4HANA 1809 FPS 01 to S/4HANA 1909 FPS 00 or FPS 01+  you may explore the option of Zero Downtime Option of SUM for SAP S/4HANA upgrades. Please check SAP Community blog for more details on Leveraging Zero Downtime Option of SUM for SAP S/4HANA update/upgrades Published by ZDO product manager jensfieger.

Additional information

Silent Data Migration: Silent Data Migration for S/4HANA 1909 Upgrade/Conversion

SAP Note 2907976 – Silent Data Migration (SDMI) – FAQ

SAP Note 2916801 - Silent Data Migration (SDMI) Configuration Options

SAP Note 2816875 - SDM Health Check with SolMan

SAP Note 2664638 – Create and assign SDMI User in a client

SAP Note 2821421 – SDM_USER: Allow creation without SAP_ALL profile

S/4HANA 1909 Upgrade Guide

SAP Help Portal  Silent Data Migration Infrastructure (SDMI)

Zero Downtime Option of SUM for SAP S/4HANA  2707731 - Prerequisites and restrictions of Zero Downtime Option of SUM for SAP S/4HANA

 

Parishudh

IT Planning & Maintenance Optimization
Center of Expertise – Customer Success – Intelligent Delivery Group
SAP America Inc.
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