SAP Performance and workload analysis

There are three transactions that we can use to analyse the performance of our SAP system.

• OS06 which allows you to monitor the operating system
• STO3 is the “Workload and Performance Statistics” transaction
• STO4 which is the database performance transaction

These are quite good because when you know them then you can perform analysis on any SAP system. It will not matter whether it is on UNIX, Windows or whether you are using Oracle or SQL Server database. The SAP interface will be the same.
Let’s look at these one by one. (STO4 will be detailed in future posts.)

Operating System Monitor (OS06)
When this loads, the following is displayed which displays an overview of the current CPU, Memory, SWAP usage etc (scroll down to see more). Unlike windows task manager which would keeps refreshing automatically, here you have to click on the “Refresh Display” (or F5) to update the stats.

Click on “Detail Analysis Menu”I like this screen. From here I can get loads of information, most of which I could easily find on a Windows machine but wouldn’t on a Unix box. Also unlike windows, from the above screen I can get information on stats from the previous 24 hours and averages.

The “LAN Check by Ping” functionality is also good. If you can’t remote onto the SAP server, you can use this utility to ping from the SAP Server using the SAP GUI.

Workload Monitor (ST03)
When this is run, the following screen is displayed which gives you on overview of your instances.
To get a more details, from the left, in the “Workload” tree, expand an instance and select a date.A lot more stats will be displayed. These can be printed, exported; you can even find the total for columns or display a graph, all using the icons above the stats. No need for Microsoft excel anymore.