Application Performance Management with Symantec i...

Confidence in a connected world.

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Application Performance

Management with Symantec i3™

for SAP

Contents

Executive summary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Typical environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Challenges of managing the environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

The Symantec i3 for SAP methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Symantec i3 for SAP solution set . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

The Web browser component . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

The network component . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

The Enterprise Portal Web component . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

The Web AS Java component . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

The Web AS ABAP component . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

The database component . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

The storage devices component . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

White Paper: Application Performance Management

Application Performance Management

Symantec i3™ for SAP

Contents (cont’d)

Symantec i3 for SAP features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

Proactive management through exceptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

End-user experience and SLAs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Correlated end-to-end view. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Understanding and correlating SAP Web AS activity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

Investigating the SAP ABAP application tier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

Investigating the SAP database tier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Long-term analysis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

An SAP operations dashboard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

Putting it all together—a typical scenario . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

Benefits of Symantec i3 for SAP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

White Paper: Application Performance Management with Symantec i3™ for SAP

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Executive summary

The introduction of SAP NetWeaver has fundamentally changed architecture and use of SAP

environments. NetWeaver allows interconnection of multiple SAP applications in order to manage

complex business processes. As an example, mySAP ERP 6.0 and mySAP SCM 2005 can be set

up to communicate and jointly drive the supply-chain processes of a car manufacturer. The

advent of SAP Enterprise Portal has also revolutionized the way end users connect to and work

with SAP systems. SAP end users now connect with their Web browser to Enterprise Portal first

and find a customized environment that is designed to support the user’s individual role in the

business process. Once logged in, users have access to backend SAP applications. However,

many SAP customers still rely on the SAP graphic user interface (GUI). There is no doubt that

the SAP world is becoming increasingly complex, interconnected, and based on Java™ and

other Internet technologies. The number of different SAP architectures und usage patterns

found in the industry is also rising. Management of these environments is more challenging

due to the number of technologies and application tiers involved (e.g., both ABAP and Java on

the application server side), multiple points of failure, and a greater number of components to

manage. The major challenge facing SAP Basis administrators today is defining a systematic

process for understanding application behavior, usage patterns, service levels, and alerts. The

new SAP technologies demand more knowledge, understanding, and responsiveness than the less

complex, traditional ones in order to adhere to service-level commitments and maintain end-user

productivity. On the other hand, maintaining 24x7 availability and the best possible end-user

response time is imperative given the increasing pace of business and the critical nature of SAP

systems in enterprises. Experienced SAP personnel recognize the need to include best practices

for application performance management throughout the entire application lifecycle.

The introduction of new technology from SAP and the ensuing complex architecture can

impose new challenges on organizations that wish to upgrade to these newer versions. Should

such an upgrade happen, the organization may expect it to require an outlay of as much as 50%

of their initial SAP investment—in terms of both cost and time. One primary challenge of such an

upgrade is to be able to forecast and plan the infrastructure capacity necessary to track the usage

patterns and performance of the old version, and to be able to compare the loads, usage, and

performance of the new implementation with the old one, already adopted by the enterprise.

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Symantec i3™ for SAP helps to address those challenges by providing industry-leading

functionality:

• Permanent collection of high-quality metrics from each SAP application tier

• Support for Java- and ABAP-based SAP applications

• Long-term data storage in a central database called the Performance Warehouse

• Service and response time from an end-user perspective (SAP Enterprise Portal and SAP GUI)

• Response-time breakdown by application tier

• Performance and availability analysis by SAP entity: applications, transactions, clients,

workload types, users, application servers, database servers, organizations, and locations

• Availability- and response time–based SLAs

• Historical baselines representing “normal” SAP load and response time as seen in the past

• Performance trend analysis to support landscape capacity planning and to take corrective

action before an issue can affect production

• Comprehensive reports on availability, response times, and other SAP key performance

indicators

• End-to-end data correlation capabilities, allowing SAP activities to be tracked through the

applications tiers in order to quickly pinpoint the root cause of a performance issue

Symantec i3 fulfills today’s needs to guarantee the performance of business-critical SAP

applications and helps to optimize return on investment (ROI) and total cost of ownership (TCO)

by maximizing utilization of existing hardware and deferring hardware investments. It is certified

by SAP to help ensure proper SAP integration and compliance with all standards.


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Introduction

The introduction of SAP NetWeaver has enabled companies to build complex SAP landscapes

consisting of a number of interconnected SAP and third-party systems that, together, drive

sophisticated business processes. SAP Enterprise Portal has revolutionized the way end users

access those SAP landscapes. Everybody can connect from anywhere, using a Web browser. For

the end user, NetWeaver means more flexibility, functionality, and convenience—but for SAP

Basis administration teams, it means more responsibility and complexity. In such environments,

Application Performance Management is a vital necessity in order to achieve optimal SAP

availability and end-user response time as well as SLA compliance.

Many problems can occur in a complex environment—whether in the network, the Web

components, the SAP application servers, the database, or the storage devices. To make the

situation worse, problems tend to be inconsistent (i.e., they can appear and disappear) or to occur

only when a certain load is reached. Managing these environments is a challenging task.

It is crucial to run 24x7 health checks for notification of potential problems before end

users are affected. It is important to understand the application behavior and the usage of the

organization from a performance point of view to verify that business objectives are met, find

where bottlenecks are, and determine the required next step to fix them.

Sometimes, companies rush to finish the SAP implementation phase—which includes

customizations and changes—and pay less attention to performance issues, scalability, and load.

Once the system has gone “live” and performance problems have begun, it is very expensive to

fix them. Symantec has developed an application performance management solution for SAP—

Symantec i3 for SAP—that monitors the entire SAP application landscape, including Web AS 7.00

and mySAP ERP 6.0.

Typical environment

SAP R/3 customers typically run on traditional ABAP 3-tier architecture consisting of a smaller

number of production systems (together with development and test systems) with several ABAP

application servers, a dedicated database instance and SAP GUI clients. However, the introduction

of SAP NetWeaver and the new generation of mySAP Business Suite applications has led to more

complex customer implementations, including more application tiers, more SAP applications, and

more interconnections.

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The example below shows a typical SAP system landscape, which is based on NetWeaver

7.0 and mySAP ERP 6.0. There are two machines in this environment. One of them is running an

SAP Enterprise Portal (EP) and other components requiring SAP Web AS Java application server

infrastructure. The other machine functions as the back end and runs a mix of ABAP and Java

components, namely ECC (Enterprise Central Component, the core of ERP 6.0), several add-ons

for mySAP ERP, and Business Intelligence (BI). From an infrastructure perspective, running these

components on one host requires a Web AS “Add-In” application server installation, consisting

of both ABAP and Java execution stacks. For simplicity, no additional application servers for EP

and ERP are included in the figure, but they exist in almost every customer environment. Also,

depending on load and scalability requirements, BI could run on a separate machine. Each SAP

system (ERP and EP) has its private database instance. SAP end users typically connect via Web

browser to Enterprise Portal, which provides a role-based environment for each user group and

connects the end users to the back-end system. However, there are still many “traditional” SAP

environments where end users use the SAP GUI to access ABAP-based SAP systems such as R/3.

Figure 1. Typical SAP environment with NetWeaver 7.0 and mySAP ERP 6.0


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Challenges of managing the environment

The management of SAP, spread across multiple tiers and multiple interconnected applications,

makes it extremely difficult to pinpoint the source of a performance problem. There are significant

challenges to managing these environments, including:

• Defining, measuring, and committing to organizational business objectives and SLAs, as

associated with the real organization users, working from multiple geographic locations

• Finding the SAP users, transactions, application modules, programs, functions, and screens

that impact the performance and those that are most easily influenced by performance

degradation

• Defining baselines of normal and abnormal application and usage behavior

• A comprehensive, yet straightforward, way to measure the user’s experience

• Identifying problem patterns and characteristics before the user is affected proactively, through

alerts, while maintaining satisfactory service levels

• Maintaining historical data for trending, exception, and capacity planning analysis

• 24x7, real-time, low-overhead collection and correlation of performance metrics across the SAP

infrastructure

• Correlating SAP application metrics such as user-activated URLs, invoked transactions, and

database SQL statements across the whole SAP infrastructure

• The ability to break down response times by tier and application component to determine the

amount of time spent in each component

• Determining the time spent in Java vs. ABAP vs. SQL statement processing

• Presenting one integrated, correlated view of all SAP infrastructure components, from the Web

user through the network, SAP Web Application Server, database, and storage devices

• Ability to focus on application server bottlenecks, such as waits while work processes complete,

memory issues, inefficient database access, high CPU utilization, etc.

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• Tracking the performance of local and remote geographical locations

• Coping with unpredictable load periods and handling massive transaction and data volumes

• Aiding SAP Basis administrators in analyzing performance issues and suggest remedies

These challenges are not covered by system management frameworks or by traditional

management tools—which only provide uncorrelated snapshots from various servers within the

SAP application infrastructure.

System management frameworks focus on system parameters, availability, and utilization.

Their primary focus is monitoring the system and the system elements’ health. Frameworks are

well suited for detecting system- and network-level issues, such as servers and applications with

high utilization, high packet rates, and numerous retries. Unfortunately, frameworks don’t focus

on the end-user experience, transactions, and usage—so, when all the system parameters look

acceptable, how can you tell why location X suffers from poor response time, or why certain SAP

URLs are slow?

The “stovepipe approach,” which takes isolated snapshots from various servers, does not

resolve the problem either. Snapshots provide very coarse information consisting of generic

statistics taken from each tier separately. For example, you can look at Java components, SAP

application servers, or Oracle® metrics and still not understand which component is causing a

bottleneck. By following the real end-user transaction across the SAP tiers, snapshots can tell you

that the average Java object, SAP transaction, and SQL response time are acceptable, but they

cannot tell which SQL statements belong to which transactions and, therefore, cannot help much

in isolating the problem.

Traditional SAP tools are limited in their ability to meet the performance management

challenges of today’s business. Because these tools have adopted a “stovepipe approach,” they

have a limited ability to correlate performance between the different infrastructure components.

The additional technologies (e.g., Web, Java) that are deployed in the latest release will only

compound the problems for these traditional methods. “Stovepipe” solutions force technical

experts to spend an excessive amount of time correlating multiple metrics to pinpoint the root

cause of performance degradation. Even as traditional tools link various GUIs to create loosely

integrated “suites,” it is still not enough to solve the problem.


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Compounding this issue, many of the data collectors deployed sample too infrequently

(e.g., once every five to ten minutes), and as a result they rarely gather enough information to

perform meaningful analysis. Performance problems are the toughest and most costly to pinpoint

and resolve. This is particularly true if the tools used do not collect enough of the necessary

information.

Metrics for end-to-end application analysis must be captured with agents that have

application knowledge and visibility and those that reflect the user experience. Real-time

performance metrics should be collected 24x7, with extreme efficiency and low overhead,

and correlated across the SAP infrastructure path to enable problem isolation and root cause

identification. Additionally, historic information must be kept for long-term analysis, exceptions,

baselines, trends, and capacity planning. Using historic data, we can calculate typical SAP

behavior—for example, there may be peaks each Monday morning for some transactions.

Knowledge of typical behavior facilitates generating exceptions for abnormal behavior and

setting the right service-level agreement (SLA) thresholds. This information also helps calculate

database table growth—allowing us to allocate enough space in advance of a slowdown or create

appropriate indexes to reduce the fetch times.

In short, typical infrastructure frameworks provide important system and network

management bottoms-up detail, but do not look at necessary end-user and transaction activity.

Traditional tools look at each tier separately—providing generic statistics for that tier—but do not

perform any correlation between tiers. These approaches lack the power to find, isolate, and focus

on the root cause of the problem or help to identify the real user response-time experience.

Symantec i3 for SAP fills this gap by providing the actual user experience and application

end-to-end response-time contribution detail. This enables SAP administrators to “see” how their

applications are performing from the perspective of their users, and to correlate that experience

with the underlying application components in terms of end-to-end performance.

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The Symantec i3 for SAP methodology

It is vital for all organizations to understand the importance of a systematic approach to coping

with performance problems, and to realize the inherent ineffectiveness of ad-hoc problem solving.

The foundation of the Symantec i3 for SAP solution is a proven methodology designed to facilitate

the rapid detection, isolation, analysis, correction, and verification of application performance

problems. All organizations can benefit from the discipline that Symantec i3 for SAP brings to

the application performance management process. The Symantec application performance

management methodology comprises five stages:

• Detect—Proactively identify the symptoms that could indicate a performance problem

• Find—Identify the problematic tier and application component

• Focus—Discover the root cause of the problem

• Improve—Take the steps required to improve performance

• Verify—Make sure the steps taken have achieved the desired goal

These stages combine to form a process that takes a systematic approach to finding and

resolving all kinds of performance issues—both predictable and unforeseen.

For example, the methodology begins with an automated proactive detection (Detect)

through baselines and SLAs, using the product’s alert capabilities. Alerts can be directed to the

appropriate infrastructure framework, organization, or person based on what was detected.

Depending on the issue detected, the SAP Basis administrator can view the application, end-

to-end, and isolate (Find) the problematic tier and application component that are the source of

the degradation. Problems could be caused by network delays, long-running servlets, RFC calls,

long-running transactions on an ABAP application server, or long database access times. The

process of finding the problematic component is end-user focused, so that we actually follow the

end-user transaction from the time it was activated by the user.


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After the problematic component is found, an in-depth analysis of that component is done

in order to focus on the root-cause of the problem (Focus). For example, after finding out that a

particular ABAP application server is the problematic component, we would like to identify the

top users and transactions, and determine whether the problem is due to a long queue wait time

for a work process or application processing time, or to a long database call. As another example,

in the case of Java issues, we would look at the different methods that are called and understand

whether the issue is due to a specific method or an expensive JDBC call.

After focusing on the problem’s root cause comes the actual fixing of the problem (Improve).

For example, allocating additional work processes fixes a long queue time waiting for a work

process to complete; adding an index to a database table fixes a long-running SQL statement

problem.

Once the fix has been applied, it is vital to confirm that the problem is indeed fixed and

that it will not reappear (Verify). Utilizing long-term information kept in the Symantec i3 for SAP

Performance Warehouse, we can compare service times before and after the fix was applied.

Doing this shows whether or not we fixed the problem and if service times are as expected.

Symantec i3 for SAP solution set

Symantec i3 for SAP focuses on providing your organization with the ability to completely manage

your application performance end to end—including the browser, the Portal, SAP Web AS (which

includes J2EE and ABAP execution stacks), database, and even the physical storage. Conceptually,

Symantec i3 for SAP is composed of Insight, Indepth, and Inform functionality. Figure 2 following

depicts the architectural components.

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Symantec Insight provides the agents and logic required to enable your IT organization to

see the end-to-end response time contributions across the client, network, application server,

and database server and to isolate those components that are responsible for slowdowns. The

process starts by measuring the actual end-user response time at the application, transaction, or

Web-page level. Then, upon detection of a response-time objective (RTO) or baseline breach, the

problematic tier and component are found, as described earlier in the methodology section.

Symantec Indepth™ provides in-depth drill-downs to identify the root cause of problems.

It collects and correlates detailed component information (e.g., application server utilization

and workload, top-heavy transactions, J2EE specific information, methods, Oracle resource

consumption breakdown, slowest SQL statements, etc.).

Figure 2. Architectural components of Symantec i3 for SAP


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Symantec Inform provides the real-time alerts that are driven by the baselines and

thresholds defined. Symantec Inform also includes the reporting components of Symantec i3 for

SAP. This rich report capability enables the presentation of ad hoc and scheduled reports. These

reports are useful for service levels, trends, and exceptions.

Symantec i3 for SAP includes the Symantec Performance Warehouse, which provides the

common repository for long-term history, collected by the different Symantec agents along the

SAP application path. The collected history facilitates trend analysis, long-term capacity planning,

baseline calculations using historical data, and correlated reports over time. Symantec i3 for

SAP includes all necessary functionality to see the actual user’s response time and analyze the

correlated contributors from end to end. These include:

• The actual service delivered to any SAP user over any given time period

• Discovery and monitoring of all SAP users and the performance of their transactions

• Enterprise Portal URLs

• Java method invocations, response times, and throughput

• SQL statements activated by specific SAP transactions

• Database resource consumption breakdown and linking of logical database access to physical

storage

• SAP ABAP application server metrics such as CPU usage, load average, page faults, connected

users, and active users

The remainder of this section provides more detail on the functionality and data entities

collected from each tier and component across the SAP application infrastructure.

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The Web browser component

The best way to measure service-level objectives (SLOs) is from the end-user point of view, at

the browser level, measuring real SAP activity response times. Symantec has developed a unique

technology that sends a tiny piece of code that is attached to each Web page and monitors the

end-user performance from the end-user browser—collecting performance metrics 24x7 from

all users. No installation is required at the end-user desktop. Main data entities collected by this

component include:

• Response time—the time from first byte through rendering time

• SLOs—both warning and critical

Other data entities are collected as well, including connection type (LAN vs. dial-up), protocol type

(HTTP vs. HTTPS), http method, and browser type.

The network component

Symantec i3 for SAP monitors the network response times for SAP clients at multiple geographical

locations. This enables problem detection of remote users and sites as well as differentiation

between front-end network time and back-end time. (Back-end time refers to the components

from the portal server to the database.) Main data entities collected by this component include:

• Client IP network addresses

• Request service times

• Front-end network time vs. back-end time differentiation

• Number of requests and throughput

• Number of bytes sent/received

• Response time to remote geographical locations


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The Enterprise Portal Web component

Symantec i3 for SAP measures URL response times at the Enterprise Portal Web server tier. It is

important to understand which URLs are the heaviest from a response-time perspective, as well as

the top URLs from a resource-consumption perspective. Starting from SAP Web AS 6.20, the Web

server component comes as part of the Web AS. Main data entities collected by this component

include:

• URL service times (time to retrieve a specific URL by the Web server and the back-end system)

• Web server machines and Web server instances

• Domains

• URL file types

• Client IP address that requested the URL

• Response time to remote geographical locations

The Web AS Java component

SAP runs various J2EE components in Web AS Java application servers. It is important to analyze

that activity to find potential slowdowns. The main data entities that Symantec i3 for SAP collects

from this component include:

• Java Virtual Machine (JVM) health data

• Top HTTP service requests

• Servlet response time and throughput

• Drill-down and correlation of called methods

• JDBC request response-time and SQL statements in case of direct database access

• CPU time, JVM memory, and garbage collection information as well as Java Management

Extensions (JMX) metrics

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The Web AS ABAP component

The Web AS ABAP application server, where SAP transactions are executed, plays a key role

in the SAP architecture. A transaction being executed can have several potential performance

problems at the application server tier, starting from waiting for the dispatcher and work process,

continuing with internal enqueue waits, and ending with long database access times. It is

important to monitor the system continuously for performance degradations. Main data entities

collected by this component include:

• SAP users and transactions

• Work types—dialogs and batch

• Transaction processing times, wait times, and database access times

• ABAP application modules

• ABAP programs and functions

It is possible to view the information and performance by several different categories, such as

SAP systems, organizational business units, locations, and application servers.

The database component

SAP Web AS (ABAP and Java) uses the database to access required business information. An

untuned database could cause many performance problems. It is important to monitor the

database continuously and collect the right performance metrics. It is equally important to

analyze the database access and see if we can improve its performance. Main data entities

collected by this component include:

• Database resource consumption breakdown (CPU, I/O, buffer waits, etc)

• Database users, programs, and objects

• Executed SQL statements

• Database objects, internal locks, and events as accessed by ABAP/SQL statements, as well as

their performance

• SAP users and transactions issuing the SQL requests


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It is important to emphasize the link between problematic SQL statements and their initiating

SAP users and transactions. This enables us to map SAP users and transactions to resource-

consuming SQL activities at the database level, which can dramatically accelerate root cause

analysis.

The storage devices component

One of the primary reasons for performance issues has always been inefficient physical device

access. Problems could be of several types—for example, poor balance of files on devices and

contention between files on the same device, among others. It is beneficial to be able to map

logical database objects access to physical devices in order to understand I/O device access

problems. Mapping logical Oracle I/O requests to physical storage devices becomes more crucial

in RAID-based architectures where a file can spread over multiple physical devices, using

striping techniques. Symantec has developed mapping to EMC Symmetrix® and CLARiiON®,

IBM® TotalStorage, HP® StorageWorks XP, and Hitachi Data Systems Lightning, Thunder, and

TagmaStore® Universal Storage Platform systems.

Symantec i3 for SAP features

The StartPoint screen enables a full end-to-end view of all applications tiers in the SAP

environment. StartPoint provides an alert overview of the various components by category, in a

simplified way so as to facilitate communication by team members—for example, performance or

load alerts at the database. The next step is to launch one of the Symantec i3 for SAP components

(Insight, Indepth, or Inform).

A typical scenario could start with a user launching Symantec Indepth for SAP to get an

overall view of the SAP environment—or receiving a proactive alert indicating that a service-

level threshold has been exceeded. Long-term trend analysis and information on top resource

consumers could easily be obtained through reports using long-term metrics stored in the

Performance Warehouse.

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Proactive management through exceptions

Managing a large SAP application infrastructure with hundreds or thousands of users is difficult,

to say the least. The only way to do so effectively is to work proactively rather than reactively.

Symantec i3 for SAP provides the way to do this through the use of exceptions, based on

automatically computed SLAs and baselines. When an exception is detected by Symantec i3 for

SAP, the user is alerted about the normative deviation. In addition, Symantec i3 for SAP provides

capacity trending that will alert the user should future unforeseen loads and performance issues

impact the overall SLA and performance. The graphics below show an alert generated on a SAP

transaction code that has breached the SLA.

Figure 3. Symantec i3 for SAP StartPoint screen


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Figure 4. Inform/Alerts showing SAP alerts

Figure 5. Alert detail indicating an end-user performance issue

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End-user experience and SLAs

End-user satisfaction is extremely important: If end users are satisfied, application managers are

satisfied. Symantec i3 for SAP provides a way to measure response times as experienced by end

users and to define SLA thresholds on those metrics.

Correlated end-to-end view

Launching Symantec Insight provides an end-to-end overview of the different tiers and

components. This view is correlated across components, which means you can view, for example,

the J2EE components invoked by a specific URL or the SQL statements executed by a specific user

or transaction. The graphic below shows an example of an Insight overview screen for a multi-tier

SAP environment.

Figure 6. Inspection of users of slow transaction VA01


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On the upper left-hand side of figure 7, Service Time Comparison, we see the different tiers for

Web, J2EE, ABAP, and Oracle. In this example we can identify the Web tier as the main contributor

to response time impact (bars in this chart are cumulative). Just below that, we can see the SAP

application App Tiers Data Flow, from the Portal server to the database. The center part of the

screen displays the main data entities for the selected component: URLs for the Portal server,

J2EE objects for Java-based application servers, transactions running in the application server

for ABAP application servers, SQL statements for Oracle or MS SQL database. In this case, the

main screen is showing the various transactions, users, and work types—dialogs, updates, and

application servers. The information is broken out by network time, queue time, work time, and

database time. This provides an overview of what is going on in the SAP application servers.

Figure 7. Example overview screen

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Understanding and correlating SAP Web AS activity

Symantec Insight provides us with an end-to-end view as well as segmentation of activity across

tiers. Moreover, we can get high-level details on a tier we would like to focus on. To explore more

on information on J2EE activity within the SAP Web AS, let’s choose J2EE on the top menu.

Performance metrics for the SAP Web AS and JVM are displayed.

We can view the different invocation methods. In the screen above we see one method called

com.sapmarket. We can also see, on the left side of the screen, details regarding the JVM and its

scalability—i.e., how SAP Web AS is able to cope with increased load.

Figure 8. Example screen: drilling down into J2EE


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More detailed information can be obtained by drilling down into the J2EE stack. Drilling down

shows the different URLs invoked, correlating these with executed servlets and methods invoked.

By instrumenting the right J2EE classes, we can continue to drill down and view the different

methods invoked.

Investigating the SAP ABAP application tier

To get more detailed information on the SAP ABAP application tier, we can launch the Symantec

Indepth for SAP component. This component provides details on the SAP application server

load, availability, and response times, broken by systems, locations, organization units, users,

transactions, SAP application modules (e.g., SD, FI, etc.), program names, screen numbers, and

more. The next screens present such examples.

Figure 9. Example: application server inspection of system FICO-PRD

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For each transaction, we can view its network, application, and database times as well as its

response time vs. a predefined SLA.

Figure 10. Example: details on worst-performing transactions executed for a specific production environment


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Figure 11. Example: the top worst-performing batch jobs sorted by total duration

Figure 12. Detail view of a selected batch job with its parameters

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Information on additional application server resources, as well as recommended values for

important metrics, can be obtained in a similar way.

Investigating the SAP database tier

At the database level, detailed resource consumption breakdowns, SQL statements, users, and

programs are provided. Moreover, a unique integration between Sybase Indepth for SAP and

Sybase Indepth for Oracle allows for direct correlation of the SAP workload from a high-level

SLA view all the way down to a SQL statement that was executed in the database and even

into the underlying storage where the data file exists. This gives us an understanding of which

organization or location is responsible for the poor response time. Figure 13 shows a detailed

resource consumption view of an SQL statement generated by a SAP ABAP application server.

Figure 13. Unique SQL statement generated by a transaction; in this case, the statement shows a long Oracle CPU time


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We can now review the execution plan and its history of the problematic SQL statement.

In this case we see that the time spent in Oracle for this SAP transaction increased after the

execution plan changed.

Symantec i3 for SAP also provides a complete database analysis technology that includes

“what-if” simulation, SmarTune recommendations, and an index-tuning advisor that helps with

index creation as well as simulation of the index’s impact before the index is actually created.

Figure 14. Execution plan and history of a SQL statement

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Long-term analysis

Performance metrics collected from all SAP application tiers are kept in the Symantec i3 for SAP

Performance Warehouse. These performance metrics are used for trend analysis and capacity

planning. Symantec i3 for SAP includes a reporting feature called Foresight, which uses the

Performance Warehouse to generate hundreds of out-of-the-box Adobe Acrobat reports. These

reports range from exception reports showing specific service-level breaches to alert reports

showing deviation from nominal behavior; profile reports, which enable you to analyze correlated

performance data between tiers; availability reports for both application server types and remote

locations; as well as many types of capacity-planning reports that will enable you to plan for the

future, based on past and present trends.

Figure 15. Symantec i3 for SAP can generate hundreds of useful reports right out of the box


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For example, the screen in figure 15 depicts an exception report that details the number of

transactions and database time, over time, and shows how these metrics deviate from baselines.

Baselines capture “normal” application behavior, as seen in the past. Using baselines, it is easy

to differentiate short-term performance spikes for real issues and to identify performance/usage

trends. By using exception thresholds, one can configure the level of deviation from baselines,

causing exceptions to be generated.

An SAP operations dashboard

The Application Service Dashboard (ASD) is a new way to access Symantec i3 for SAP through a

portal-based GUI infrastructure. It relies on open standards and provides a highly customizable

dashboard. It aggregates data from multiple sources (e.g., database, storage, and application

server tools) across the Symantec i3 for SAP product suite to deliver next-generation performance-

management capabilities on a single console. ASD comes with a set of predefined SAP portlets,

which can be utilized to configure customized and personalized SAP landscape views, meeting

the requirements of the different roles involved in SAP management and operations, such as

monitoring and Basis or database administration. Working that way, all people can see what they

need to see in the way they want to see it. Figure 16 shows an example of a SAP ASD view.

Figure 16. Symantec ASD showing a top-level summary of SAP environments, transactions, and SLA compliance

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Putting it all together—a typical scenario

Now that we are familiar with Symantec i3 for SAP, let’s look at a typical scenario, including the

components SAP NetWeaver 7.0, SAP ERP 6.0, and Oracle. Our scenario starts with a call into

the help desk. A SAP user from the sales department is complaining about slow response time as

sales orders are entered into the ERP 6.0 system. The user mentions that, normally, the response

time is excellent and that it seems to have gotten worse “in the last few days.” Unfortunately, the

user has no quantitative definition of what “worse” is, so normally our help-desk staff would have

no idea whether this user’s subjective judgment about response time is better or worse than the

company’s established service-level standards. It should be noted that without a solution such as

Symantec i3 for SAP in place, the help desk’s only recourse is to open a ticket and assign it to the

SAP Basis team. In this case, however, our help desk can first refer to a Foresight exception report

(figure 17), which shows that this user has an established baseline dialog response time of 0.45

seconds, but that in the last few days it has jumped to over 9 seconds—an increase of more than

2000%.

Figure 17. Foresight “exception” report for a top SAP user


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At this point, having gone through one level of triage, the help desk opens a trouble ticket

and forwards it to the Basis team—which, upon receiving the trouble ticket, views the user’s

exception report and uses Symantec i3 for SAP’s in-context launch capability (the link in the upper

right-hand corner of the exception report) to automatically start Symantec Indepth for SAP and go

directly to the time period and transaction in question, so they can zero in on the problem.

It is important to note that, in this scenario, had the user’s response time been within the

service-level threshold, the help desk could have resolved the issue without opening a ticket.

Looking more closely at the previous screen, we can see that this user has a high transaction

load and recently has been spending a larger amount of time waiting for the database to respond

to requests. Symantec Indepth for SAP also tells us this particular user predominantly executed

transaction VA01.

Figure 18. High dialog response time for a specific transaction

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Now that we know that the user’s response time increase is due to a poorly performing

transaction VA01 in the database, we can begin exploring the problem in the database tier. Once

again, with the integration available in Symantec i3 for SAP, we can launch Symantec Indepth for

Oracle (or Indepth for SQL) carrying the context of our current investigation into the database tier.

Figure 20. Using Symantec Indepth for Oracle to examine the SQL statements of the SAP transaction and its history

Figure 19. Graph showing a recent increase in database response time


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The previous screen reveals that the SQL statement associated with the poorly performing

transaction has a very high I/O wait time. We can drill down further to the spindle level to

investigate why exactly the I/O contention is taking place, or how other storage-related problems

might be contributing to the problem.

To summarize, Symantec i3 for SAP began from a static high-level user report that indicated

extremely high end-user response time. We launched our investigation in context through the SAP

NetWeaver architecture, including both the application server tier and Oracle. We found that the

user’s primary workload over the last ten days included transaction that performed very poorly

in the last two of those days, and further, that the transaction’s poor response time was directly

attributable to poor database response time. The database problem was then narrowed down to

high database I/O wait times.

Figure 21. Symantec i3 for SAP using Symantec Indepth for Oracle to investigate the SQL statement

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In order to investigate the above problems, we had to have the knowledge of correlating SAP

applications, all the way from the SAP GUI to the database and even the storage array. We also

had to be able to correlate SAP transactions with invoked SQL statements. Having this information

is fundamental for segmenting a response-time problem across the various SAP tiers.

Benefits of Symantec i3 for SAP

From a business perspective, using Symantec i3 for SAP can help organizations significantly

reduce performance slowdowns, defer hardware investments, and, therefore, achieve rapid ROI

while maintaining low TCO. Symantec i3 for SAP significantly helps organizations to:

• Understand who is using SAP, which applications and transactions they are using, and when

and where they are using them

• Proactively detect potential problems before they can negatively impact end users

• Improve end-user satisfaction with the application

• Increase ROI

• Detect, find, and solve problems more quickly

• Defer hardware investments by fully leveraging existing hardware

• Reduce TCO—both by significantly reducing the amount of staff, time, and effort involved in

the problem management process; and by allowing less experienced staff to participate in that

process without negatively affecting the quick isolation and resolution of problems

• Verify adherence to business-level objectives

• Conduct organizational health checks through baselines and service-level exceptions

• Effectively communicate the service-level achievements and improvements to the organization

• Eliminate “blamestorming” between IT organizations

• Manage and tune the application to utilize system resources more effectively


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• Use just-in-time capacity, deferring equipment and associated software licenses and support

costs until they are actually needed

• Better understand future capacity requirements, based on current SAP usage and growth

patterns

In summary, Symantec i3 for SAP is an excellent vehicle for measuring and improving

performance objectives, and it provides the necessary mechanisms to realize significant savings in

cost and effort while effectively managing application performance.

Summary

SAP has become an essential part of many organizations—and this trend continues to grow

with the introduction of NetWeaver, incorporating new technologies such as Enterprise Portal

for end-user access and the Web AS Java architecture. While this is a great advance for end-

users—improving business efficiency, productivity, and satisfaction—it poses great challenges for

SAP administrators and others who are responsible for the smooth management of these complex

applications. More than ever before, managing SAP performance is a challenge.

In this environment, delivering the right levels of service has become very challenging as well.

Managing the new SAP architecture is fundamentally more difficult due to the inherent complexity

introduced by its multiple tiers, its mixture of new and legacy technologies in the path, and its

database calls and storage access.

Experience has shown a direct correlation between an organization’s provided service levels

and its productivity (internal) and revenue generation (external). There is also a direct correlation

between targeted service levels and the expense incurred to achieve those service levels. The

penalty for not meeting the users’ performance expectations may mean a loss of user productivity,

loss of revenue, and the failure to realize an ROI on the system investment.

Symantec i3 for SAP offers a unique solution to these challenges. It addresses the

complexities of managing SAP performance, and it actually simplifies the deployment and ongoing

maintenance of SAP systems. Using Symantec i3 for SAP helps companies manage service levels,

contain costs, and maximize the effectiveness of their operational investments.

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Symantec i3 for SAP is one of the industry’s first solutions to provide a way to quickly and

efficiently capture and correlate SAP application metrics such as URLs, J2EE objects, RFC calls,

ABAP transaction activity, and SQL statements across the SAP infrastructure. It presents these

important metrics in a manner that enables crisp communication and rapid proactive or reactive

detection, correction, and verification throughout the application lifecycle.

Symantec i3 for SAP sets a new milestone in SAP performance management by delivering a

comprehensive integrated software solution that addresses the major challenges associated with

the management of SAP multi-tier application components.

For specific country offices and

contact numbers, please visit

our Web site. For product

information in the U.S., call

toll-free 1 (800) 745 6054.

Symantec Corporation

World Headquarters

20330 Stevens Creek Boulevard

Cupertino, CA 95014 USA

+1 (408) 517 8000

1 (800) 721 3934

www.symantec.com

About Symantec

Symantec is a global leader in

infrastructure software, enabling

businesses and consumers to have

confidence in a connected world.

The company helps customers

protect their infrastructure,

information, and interactions

by delivering software and services

that address risks to security,

availability, compliance, and

performance. Headquartered in

Cupertino, Calif., Symantec has

operations in 40 countries.

More information is available at

www.symantec.com.

Copyright © 2007 Symantec Corporation. All rights reserved. Symantec, the Symantec logo, i3, and Indepth are trademarks or registered trademarks of Symantec Corporation or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. HP is a registered trademark of Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. IBM is a registered trademark of IBM Corporation. Oracle is a registered U.S. trademark of Oracle Corporation. Java is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. 10/07 12875757

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