SAP ABAP Local Transaction Analytics
@Vipin Menon @Sridhar Venkatesh
SAP ABAP sensor is designed to monitor SAP Systems in a nonintrusive manner without the need to import any packages or modules into the SAP system. Instana supports both local and remote monitoring of SAP ABAP systems. For more information, see monitoring SAP systems.
TCode Analytics is a new addition to our SAP observability offering where no additional steps are required to the existing configuration.
You can monitor the SAP system transactions (Tcodes) by using Instana’s Tcode Analytics feature. In the Service tab in the Applications section of Instana, all the Tcodes that are executed on a system are grouped into a single service with the system name. Each Tcode is an endpoint within the service, and you can view its execution metrics — throughput and latency in the service dashboard. You can filter the data in the dashboard for further analysis by using Instana’s unbounded analytics. These analytics dashboards can showcase metrics for both RFC and HTTP calls. In Instana, the HTTP requests are categorized as HTTP task type, and RFC calls are categorized as the RPC task type.
Example:
The IL4 SAP system is monitored by using the SAP ABAP sensor. All the Tcodes that are executed are grouped into IL4 service as shown in the following image. Click IL4 to view the various metrics of the Tcode such as calls, latency, and detailed execution time.
In the Service dashboard, all TCodes that are associated with the IL4 SAP system, the summary of the calls, and the latency of all the TCodes are displayed. You can visualize the metrics for a specific TCode from the Endpoints Tab or by clicking a specific TCode in the Top Endpoints widget. Instana has a built-in event to alert the user about the issues associated with the TCode execution. You can view the issues that are associated with the TCode execution by clicking the Issues button.
You can click the Analyze Calls button to access the Unbounded Analytics section. In the Analytics section, you can filter TCodes run by a user and even select reports that are run by the user.
Some analytics examples:
- Group all users who have run a specific Tcode
- Group all Tcodes run by a user
- Show all the Tcodes run in a SAP system
You can click a TCode to view detailed metrics and a breakdown of its execution time as shown in the following figure. A TCode is visualized as a destination endpoint for the service corresponding to the SAP system. Since this example was an RFC execution, the category RPC is assigned to it. The panel on the right shows the breakdown of the execution time into Roll in, Roll out, Database time, and Work process (code execution) time. Breaking down the response time will help users determine how much time is spent on each stage of execution, allowing them to pinpoint where the time was used.
Events and Alerts
The Tcode throughput and latency data are available to be used in the Instana Smart Alert feature. This data helps to detect abnormal conditions and sens alerts through configured channels for immediate attention or automated remediation. Adaptive thresholds can also be set in these Smart Alerts that evolve and adjust themselves continuously based on new data.
The following figure shows an email alert triggered from Smart Alerts on the delay of a Tcode execution that has exceeded a static threshold set to 3000 ms.
Clicking on the ViewEvent button in the email launches the Instana UI with details about the alert. The details include the time at which the threshold was breached and the current trend as shown in the following figure.
The Analyze calls button will then take you to the Analytics page for this problematic call where the details regarding its breakdown will be shown to identify the cause for the delay, and its related infrastructure context in the local agent monitoring mode.
Conclusion
This blog shows how local ABAP transactions within an SAP system are monitored and visualized in Instana using Unbounded Analytics features. A series of blogs will be published to showcase different use cases of how Instana provides deeper insights into SAP TCode executions.
Reference
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/instana-observability/current?topic=sap-monitoring-abap-sensor
