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Solution Operations - Run SAP Like a Factory

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Solution Operations RUN SAP LIKE A FACTORY Quick Reference SAP Active Global Support version 8.0 May 3, 2011
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Page 1: Solution Operations - Run SAP Like a Factory

Solution Operations RUN SAP LIKE A FACTORY

Quick Reference SAP Active Global Support version 8.0 – May 3, 2011

Page 2: Solution Operations - Run SAP Like a Factory

Introduction Run SAP like a Factory is SAP’s approach to operating SAP solutions. This booklet explains in a visionary way how to use this approach to operate an SAP for Banking solution. Banking solutions are inherently complex, as they involve many different physical and logical components joined by critical interfaces. As well as being complex, they must satisfy demanding service levels both for online real-time transactions and high-volume, no-errors-permitted batch processing. Using Run SAP like a Factory, you can operate your SAP Banking solution with manageable effort. With SAP Run SAP like a Factory you can perform the following tasks:

Verify that your business-critical processes run correctly with good performance, no break in

communication, no data loss, and no errors.

Monitor components of the end-to-end processes to ensure that they are available and stay

available for all your critical processes, both for daily transaction work and for your End-of-Day

(batch) processing.

Manage business process exceptions which are virtually inevitable in solutions with high

complexity and volume, wherever they may occur.

Rapidly identify the root cause of a problem, and restore service if any interface or component

fails.

Integrate all providers in an Operations Control Center for 24 x 7 Mission Critical Support.

Run SAP like a Factory How Run SAP like a Factory works: Run SAP like a Factory provides, through SAP Solution Manager, a central Operations Control Center which provides all important status and runtime information of the key business processes, their critical interfaces and their underlying components. SAP Solution Manager collects and analyzes alert information from all SAP and non-SAP backend components. You as a member of the Operations Control Center are actively notified in case of critical alerts and you start any necessary error analysis in SAP Solution Manager. However, issues in front end components are directly handled by the banking associate or the end user.SAP components are instrumented and already prepared for integration as of SAP Banking platform 8.0. Non-SAP components have to be manually instrumented to cover business processes end-to-end. Adapters and interfaces as well as instrumentation kits for Java and .Net applications are offered by SAP.

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The Operations Control Center provides 24x7 Mission Critical Support. You work together with your technical and functional IT support colleagues and all external support providers, who are linked in by video conferencing systems.

Figure 1: The Operations Control Center Your alert thresholds are configured such that performance alerts are raised even before a critical state has been reached. This gives you time to correct the error before business users are impacted. For other alerts, you get clear guidance whether your immediate attention is required or you can follow-up later. You work mainly in the central alert inbox in SAP Solution Manager, which shows technical and functional alerts of all components in one screen. You can also customize the filter settings, for instance, to only show technical alerts.

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For troubleshooting, you have additional tools and methods: The root cause analysis tools help identify the faulty component in case of performance problems. An SAP Exception Management Cockpit helps you analyze technical as well as business process exceptions. Once the faulty component has been identified, locally acting expert analysis transactions offer further drill-down capabilities.

Figure 2: Overview monitors for technical operators (monitors can be tailored to operator needs) All the SAP IT Operations tools integrate seamlessly with each other. This is especially important for the Service Desk (3

rd party product, or SAPs Service Desk as part of SAP Solution Manager), which is part of the incident

management process, and for all tools used for change management, monitoring, and job scheduling.

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Operations Control Center: Your Tasks in IT Operations Run SAP like a Factory is powerful enough to enable you to manage a complex Banking solution with only a few people. Your activities will be the following:

Working with the central alert inbox in SAP Solution Manager

This is your main area of activity. The alert inbox is always on the main screen, and runs in “auto-

refresh” mode.

Pro-active monitoring

You are always able to pro-actively monitor critical processes and system performance. At all times, you

have overview monitors on the main screen which serve as a starting point for monitoring.

Technical administration

This covers all periodic technical tasks such as OS cleanup, or monitoring the transport or backup

environment, as well as processing simple technical service requests (for example, process / system

restart, manual move of files between servers, generating technical reports).

You will spend most of your time processing alerts which appear in the central alert inbox. If there are no urgent alerts, you will make regular checks of the other monitors and work on your scheduled tasks.

Pro-active monitoring, and working with the alert inbox You have four core monitoring areas, which record the status of the SAP Banking solution:

Status of the core business processes:

This monitor displays the core business processes. The color code signals to you whether there

are severe business exceptions, or whether the process has come to a full stop (for example, in

case of End-of-Day processing). You need to take immediate action in this case.

Status of the technical components

A graphical landscape diagram visualizes all components of the SAP Banking solution. The

color code of the components indicates whether the components are up and running, or if there

are problems.

End-user-experience monitoring

This is the monitoring of the response time a business user may face (including network

runtimes).

Alert inbox

You will mainly work in the alert inbox, which contains technical as well as functional alerts. You

have to follow up on all entries as soon as they appear. For most critical alerts, you will be

notified via SMS, pager or email.

These monitors are also displayed on large screens in the command center 24x7. They refresh

automatically. All main support activity starts from here.

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The alert inbox complements the overview monitors. The layout can be personalized to your needs. At times of many alerts, alert grouping helps you maintain an overview. You check the alert inbox regularly, or whenever an indicator turns red in the overview monitors. An overview monitor provides the summary of related alerts. You can select an alert type (for example, “system alerts” or “business process alerts”) to see all the alerts of that type.

Figure 3: Alert inbox You open an alert and assign yourself as the processor. You see a detailed description, recommended tasks, what to do to escalate, whom to call, and context information (for example, details of the performance history or the relevant system). You can trigger a keyword search to get additional information. However, the alert engine in SAP Solution Manager has already correlated micro-monitoring information from the alert context to enrich the alert information, and to give you an initial idea of what the root cause could be, or at least where to look first. If available, an auto-reaction or self-healing method has been already triggered by the system. A manual check is often offered as a guided procedure. This is an analysis wizard which provides you additional documentation, guides you step-by-step through the process, and which calls the corresponding backend transactions without you even needing to intervene.

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If you cannot resolve the problem, convert the alert to an incident by a single mouse click, and pass it to the help desk for processing by the next level technical or functional support. The next level support is actively notified, depending on the criticality of the incident. A support expert takes over processing, and has additional powerful tools to analyze the root cause and to resolve the incident. When the alert reason has been resolved, the alert is closed. The alert then disappears from the inbox, but can still be retrieved from history tables, if required. Therefore, during normal processing, your task is to keep the alert inbox empty for critical alerts. In addition to the overview monitors, you can request a set of dashboards.

Figure 4: Dashboards for IT reporting The dashboards show you the history of important technical and business process performance KPIs. You can use the drill-down or forecast capabilities of the dashboards. This helps you to:

Assess the current system behavior

(“Is it better or worse compared to yesterday?”; “Is there a negative performance trend for the

End-of-month processing?”)

Check what has changed between today and yesterday

(“Yesterday everything was fine”)

Estimate the risk of violating a service level agreement – which determines the priority of an

incident

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In addition you can check the other overview monitors. The status monitor for business processes presents a graphical overview of all processes steps of individual business processes. This comprises the following:

For processes running in dialog mode (e.g. Online Banking or daily processes like Payment

Processing), the monitor indicates whether there are critical process exceptions, such as system

dumps for a specific step. Interface errors between components are displayed as well.

For processes running in background mode (e.g. End-of-Day Processing), the monitor shows

application errors within individual reports in red. Furthermore, a certain step turns red if the

processing performance falls below a certain limit, or comes to a complete stop.

You should click on each yellow or red entry in this monitor. Double-clicking a color coded

component leads you either to related alerts in the alert inbox, or – if everything is ok – provides

further performance or log information.

The status monitor for technical components presents you the technical status of systems or groups of systems. A component turns red, for example, in case of technical unavailability, performance problems, or technical exceptions. A double-click on a component leads you to related alerts in the inbox, or shows historic values of performance KPIs including thresholds. If a productive component is not available, you have to check the business impact immediately, and if a fail-over component has properly switched to the secondary component. You need to create an incident for the technical support to bring the primary component up again. You should also regularly check the status monitor for “business users” (“End-user-experience monitoring”). Based on synthetic load generated by robots, the monitor presents the system response time business users may feel by working in their corresponding location. You then click a red box to request a detailed performance history view, and to get a list of further drill-down capabilities.

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Technical Administration There are always housekeeping tasks you need to process. Those activities were pre-defined by the technical or functional support lead, or came in as a service request from other support teams. A common way of planning and running housekeeping activities is looking at the IT Calendar in SAP Solution Manager, which centrally shows you the planned status of a system (e.g. business hours and non-business hours, maintenance times, etc).

Figure 5: IT Calendar Based on the IT Calendar, you can start working on the technical administration tasks. For instance, to clear up the remaining items from the last planned maintenance weekend, you get a list of all related tasks with all processed and open activities. Common technical housekeeping includes database maintenance, or the follow-up on transport errors.

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Business Process Operations - Example: Monitoring the End-of-Day Processing The following example shows how you can handle exceptions from the End-of-Day Processing together with a functional support expert. The End-of-Day runs are background jobs scheduled by the central job scheduler, often without user interaction. Some of the jobs are using Parallel Processing Framework to process huge volumes of data in parallel. The End-of-Day Processing is time critical, and needs to finish before daily business starts. Critical technical and application exceptions from End-of-Day processing (e.g. job cancellation, high volume of data cannot be processed successfully ...) needs to be addressed and resolved immediately, otherwise the End-of-Day processing can be delayed and normal business operation can be affected significantly. As one of the most important SAP Banking processes, the End-of-Day Processing is displayed in an aggregated way in the process overview monitor. You click on individual process steps to get performance data like the number of objects to be processed (“due objects”), throughput, and estimated end time. This information is collected automatically for you by Business Process Monitoring. You should compare the numbers with past runs (e.g. yesterday or last month), to check, if the performance has changed. This trend analysis is again displayed in dashboards, along with agreed business SLAs. You click on steps with alerts marked in red to see all related alerts in the alert inbox. You first need to make sure that the End-of-Day job chain is still running.

Figure 6: BPM work center - Step list and key figures of the End-of-Day Processing From the alert, you can jump into the detailed step list of the End-of-Day Processing. The step list in SAP Solution Manager shows all steps which are already processed (in red or green color code). In case of a complete process breakdown (for instance due to a technical job abortion, which cannot be restarted), you need to create an incident with priority “Very High” and pass it to the next level support team to follow-up. On-call support experts (technical and/or functional) will then take immediate action. But very often the job chain continues to work. As a next step, you should analyze the status of the jobs. With a single click from the central alert list in SAP Solution Manager you can jump into the local job management transaction in the SAP Banking system.

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Here you check both the technical and the application return code of the jobs. It might happen that the job technically finishes successfully, although the application return code indicates single or multiple application errors. For those jobs which show errors, you open the central job documentation, which is part of your operations handbook. For each job, you will get a detailed description what you should do in case of errors. Sometimes this is a simple restart procedure that you can perform yourself. In other cases the documentation will tell you to open an incident and to pass it to a certain processing queue to follow up. However, due to the heterogeneous character of a typical Banking landscape, it is very likely that you have a central job scheduler in use (e.g. SAP Central Process Scheduling by Redwood, SAP CPS). SAP CPS can react to both technical and application return codes. If allowed by the business, your job scheduler automatically restarts the faulty job instance for completing the processes. In this case, you start your check in SAP CPS, and make sure automated re-processing finishes successfully. But if application errors still exist, you usually should create an incident for the functional support team for further analysis. The functional support expert starts the analysis in SAP Solution Manager’s work center for Business Process Monitoring (BPMon). From here he can jump into the “MassMan Monitoring” transaction in the Banking backend system for analysis of applicable jobs (mass runs using the Parallel Processing Framework (PPF)). All job activity is displayed in an overview list along with context information.

Figure 7: MassMan monitoring transaction From the MassMan screen, the functional support expert can jump into other detailed analysis transactions. Jobs in status “P” needs to be followed up in the “Post-Processing Office” (PPO). Those entries are critical and therefore, they are highlighted in SAP Solution Manager as well. From SAP Solution Manager the support expert can directly jump into the PPO.

Figure 8: PPO alerts in SAP Solution Manager

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The PPO is the place for business objects that need to be post-processed. All object data relevant for processing an error is combined in a post-processing order. For instance, when an account cannot be settled during the settlement run, the PPO order will show the bank account and the account holder information, and the related application log entries to allow a more comfortable error correction. Once the root cause of an error is solved, a reprocessing of the job or the single object should be triggered (either automatically, or you will get a service request notification via the help desk to restart the job manually). The functional support expert closes the incident afterwards. It might also happen that a payment exceeds the account limit, or there are insufficient funds in an account. In this case the payment will not be processed, and a “Posting Control Office” (PCO) order is being generated, which links all required information. SAP Solution Manager reports on the number of PCO orders. A certain number of not yet processed PCO orders is normal, but you will see an alert in the alert inbox in case a the number of not processed order has reached the pre-defined threshold. In this case you should convert the alert into an incident for the functional support / peer from the business to follow up in the PCO.

Business Process Operations - Example: Automated Business Exception Management The next example describes how you and a functional support expert handle business process exceptions during online day processing, where many dialog transactions are handled in parallel. During online daily processing, your task is to make sure that the overall system performance is sufficient by periodically checking the overview monitors. Check the alert inbox: In case of alerts like ABAP dumps, you can check the guided procedures database for simple repair procedures. But often you will see alerts which point to business exceptions due to communication problems between components. Business exceptions require application knowledge to analyze. You convert the alert and context information into an incident, and pass it with high priority to the appropriate second level functional support team to follow up. The support expert opens the SAP Exception Management Cockpit (EMC) in SAP Solution Manager. This cockpit centrally bundles all process flow and logging information which is automatically created during normal business processing, as well as additional tracing information in case a certain business process failures. Based on the error information, SAP Solution Manager pre-selects certain guided procedures from the guided procedure database. The support expert sees a complete flow of the business process and the error environment. This is required to get a clear picture of what happened in the affected component, and why. On top of that, the functional support expert may have answer the question: “Has the business process instance finally completed – Yes or No?” Such a question can be difficult to answer in case of having many interface calls between components. Incomplete process instances may cause data inconsistencies, which can have severe financial impact if they remain undetected. To avoid checking the business process instances manually, SAP continuously collects log information when web services are being called. SAP Solution Manager centrally bundles the information in a process journal which is displayed in a “Business Process Completeness Check” BPCC. Here the complete process flow is presented including error, commit or rollback information.

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Figure 9: SAP Exception Management Cockpit with Business Process Graphic The support expert either triggers a repair, or a clean-up guided procedure. The guided procedure then calls the required business functions together with the stored business variables in the backend system to complete the process, and to get the data inconsistency resolved. If reprocessing cannot be accomplished, the service expert needs to run a clean-up activity in all components which have been already updated. It depends on the business process itself and on the status of the process instance whether this can be offered as a guided procedure or not. If guided procedure clean-up cannot be offered, a problem ticket is created by the support expert. Together with process champions in the business units, the data consistency then needs to be re-established manually. The trace information stored in the SAP Exception Management Cockpit helps identifying what needs to be cleaned up.

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Technical Operations – Example: Analyzing complex technical problems The next example describes how you and a technical support expert work on complex technical problems. At all times, you can continuously check the business user overview monitor (“End-user-experience monitoring”). It provides you with the response times that business users or banking customers are experiencing in their location (including time spent in the network), based on synthetic load, which is triggered by robots. In case that Online Banking via an SAP Portal runs slow and the response time threshold is exceeded, the overview monitor will turn red. Corresponding response time alerts appear in the central alert inbox as well. Based on thresholds this ideally happens before banking customers will start to complain.

Figure 10: Monitoring the performance business users may experience You click on the monitor for business user, and check whether the infrastructure is working fine (check that no critical alert was raised). You should also open the dashboards to check the performance in the recent past. The alert details provide further information on what to do. As a first step you should check if the corresponding system (and all of its instances) is available at all. If the whole productive system is no longer available, you should convert the alert into a priority “Very High” incident and put it onto the queue for second level technical SAP support. Message escalation will be triggered automatically (notification via distribution list, setup of bridge calls etc.). If the component is still responding, but shows bad response times, you should monitor the component for some time to check whether the response time problem persists or not. You start with workload analysis in SAP Solution Manager, which shows the current performance of individual systems. In case a service level agreement on response time is endangered, you need to create an incident. Sometimes you will see the response time within SAP is good, although the business users are experiencing bad performance. In this case you can pass the incident directly to the network group to follow-up.

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The technical support expert sees all context information in the incident. In case of Online Banking, many components can be involved. The first question to answer would be the identification of the faulty component. In some cases, this first answer might already be derived from the workload analysis. If not, then the support expert calls the End-to-End Trace, which is part of SAP Solution Manager. The trace shows all involved SAP components, and the time being spent in a component for processing. The End-to-End trace can also be activated in the overview monitor for business users. The next synthetic call from the robots will then run in trace mode.

Figure 11: End-to-End trace – Identifying the bottleneck The End-to-End trace can help to identify the performance bottleneck in a cross-component process. In the above example, this bottleneck is system PR2. A second analysis scenario in SAP Solution Manager (the “End-to-End Change Analysis) tells the support expert whether there were any configuration changes in the faulty component in the recent past (“Yesterday, it worked…”). Often, the technical support expert then starts CA Wily for running a detailed trace for a single component. Based on that trace, the root cause of the slow running application can be determined and subsequently solved by initiating a change request.

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More information

More information how to efficiently run an SAP Banking solution can be found in SAP Service Marketplace. SAP is creating an Operations Handbook which describes the tasks of an operator and support expert in detail. Please also look here:

Setup Guide - Business Process Monitoring: https://service.sap.com/~sapdownload/011000358700006137532006E/BPMon_Setup_Guide.pdf Monitoring SAP Banking Parallel Processing Jobs with Solution Manager Business Process Monitoring: https://service.sap.com/~sapidb/011000358700000743982010E Exception Handling in Banking Services: https://service.sap.com/~sapidb/011000358700000671072009E Operations Concept Banking Services: https://service.sap.com/~sapidb/011000358700000268472011E End-of-Day Exception Handling: https://service.sap.com/~sapidb/011000358700000268492011E SAP Support Portal for Business Process Management: https://service.sap.com/bpm SAP Background processing error analysis guidelines: http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw73/helpdata/en/4b/26e702f89c74fee10000000a421937/frameset.htm SAP Library - Banking Services from SAP: http://help.sap.com/saphelp_banking70/helpdata/en/06/07b73c4505dd5ce10000000a114084/frameset.htm


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