PATROL® Performance Assurance® for SAP

Minimize business risk across the entire SAP infrastructure

Simplify and proactively manage SAP applications performance in business terms

Ensure cost-effective IT investment by allocating needed resources exactly when required for optimal SAP application deployment

Proactively demonstrate the cause and effect relationship that SAP application changes have on system resources, and end-user performance

Establish the root cause of SAP application performance and response bottlenecks

Business Challenge

The success of an IT organization is measured by how cost effectively it delivers optimal levels of service, while simultaneously keeping pace with complex and changing environments. SAP implementations require a sophisticated infrastructure with large volumes of data, complex multi-tiered Web architectures, and mission-critical application modules. Competitive market threats, increased customer expectations, and new application updates challenge the business. The IT mission is to ensure that both technology and business service requirements are met.

BMC Software’s Solution

PATROL® Performance Assurance“ for SAP helps you optimize the performance of your SAP application environment, delivering higher levels of customer satisfaction and improving the accuracy of your capacity planning efforts. This solution has the ability to analyze SAP application performance data, store and report historical performance, identify key performance indicators and trend resource usage by SAP application groupings, highlight significant deviations from normal performance, and predict the impact of business and systems changes using “What if…?” modeling scenarios.

Key Features and Benefits

Establishes a common view between SAP applications, the underlying system processes, and the overall hardware resource usage, simplifying the number of tools needed for you to fully understand your environment.

Groups SAP applications into various business workload views, including views by application module, SAP User, Dialogue step and others, enabling improved cross department communication.

Discovers deviations from normal SAP application performance using statistical analysis, enabling analysts to concentrate their scarce resources on true business problems.

Controls costs, while setting achievable service level goals, by determining the business impact of resource changes with predictive modeling.

Prevents service problems by predicting the impact of change on SAP application responsiveness through multi-system workload oriented predictive modeling.

Assists with tuning existing systems and SAP applications to maximize usage and defer spending using advanced modeling capabilities.

Reduces risks by making correct business decisions based on complete and accurate data.

Performance Analysis

PATROL Performance Assurance for SAP extends the systems view provided by PATROL Performance Assurance into the SAP application. SAP system processes can be delineated into the application level, enabling an analyst to see key system resource usage by the SAP application that consumes them. CPU use, I/O activity, and memory consumption statistics are presented showing how much a certain application is contributing to the overall system load. PATROL Performance Assurance for SAP provides a unique view into system, application, and database performance. Performance data collected by PATROL for SAP Solutions –SL Reporter provides details on SAP application performance, showing where applications performance is lagging due to performance bottlenecks. Views are available from a variety of perspectives including SAP Application Module, TCODE, SAP User, SAP Task and SAP subapplication module. Graphical reports pinpoint where systems resources are insufficient to service current transaction volumes, and which system resources need attention. End-to-end transactions profiles are constructed across multiple application servers to show where response time delays are causing poor application performance.

The graphical interface allows drill-down into the historical performance database so that when performance problems arise, you can review key performance metrics to determine if it is a recurring problem and what effect it is having on application performance. In addition to the systems wide performance metrics available, these additional SAP level performance metrics are included for the SAP applications:

The historical performance database allows longer-term historical trends to be viewed for after-the-fact performance analysis and trending. User-defined summarization routines allow for weekly, monthly and quarterly summaries to be created providing management views, while automated deletion events keep the database maintained for optimal performance. Graphs can be automatically posted to a web page for more public viewing. This combines the best features of canned reporting, with its consistent data formats and layouts, with properly defined user control.

When there are many applications, servers, or RDBMS instances involved in analyzing application performance, it is often difficult to see where there might be a problem.

There might be too much data available to view and analyze to get a meaningful picture of where the problems are. Performance Assurance for SAP has a unique feature that filters out the true exceptions and what is a normal spike due to normal activity levels. This statistical filtering automates the setting of exceptions based on historical behavior for that application, server, or instance.

For example, if an unusually high number of Dialogue Steps were run on a certain day, that exception would be flagged as higher than normal. This saves valuable time as opposed to hunting for performance problems.

Application Oriented Analysis

Whether the SAP application resides with other applications or is run as an isolated application, Performance Assurance for SAP provides a viewpoint of systems activity that highlights the system activity consumed by all applications. Why is that important? Competition among applications is important to understand so you can have an accurate picture of why performance is poor and what options there are to improve it. Often decisions about combining or isolating applications are made with minimal information. PATROL Performance Assurance for SAP provides that full systems-wide picture to see which applications are consuming resources, and whether competition for a specific resource is the cause of poor performance.

Various graphs are available to show detailed and summarized System, RDBMS, and SAP R/3 data—presented as SAP applications and viewed in performance terms. Additional workloads can be defined that directly relate to business processes. Subsequent prediction, visualization, and reporting activities can then be conducted in terms that not only enhance the understanding of system performance, but also put it in terms that directly matter to the organization.

Capacity Planning and Performance Prediction

Performance Assurance for SAP includes a predictive modeling component called Predict. This “What if…?” modeling tool provides a look into the future to preview the impact of changes to transaction volume or hardware configurations. Forecasted changes to applications or configurations can be seen ahead of time to ensure you are ready to handle new modules, additional users, or any unexpected changes in transaction activity.

This performance solution provides numerous “What if…?” scenarios to evaluate changes to systems configuration (CPU, memory, I/O) or to the transaction profiles, as well as other attributes. In “What if…?” scenarios the user can evaluate potential changes in a variety of ways, including load balancing, transaction volume increases, I/O balancing and reconfiguration, server consolidation, and system upgrades. The solution also has an option called Scenario Planner that will automatically generate a set of scenarios given a projected growth in workloads. Capacity planning is greatly simplified with the use of the scenario planner to drive forecasted growth and see how response times are impacted. Scenario Planner identifies when existing resources will be exhausted. Alternate configurations can then be tested to see what can be done to solve the future resource problem.

Helping you maintain advantage

BMC Software Professional Services helps your company maintain its competitive advantage through a comprehensive suite of services that includes service level management consulting, installation, implementation, configuration, and customization. Our professional services and education offerings are designed to ensure the ongoing availability of critical business applications, maximize product potential, reduce project risk, deliver IT value to your business, and improve your operations. For more information about BMC Software Professional Services, visit http://www.bmc.com/profserv.

About BMC Software

BMC Software, Inc. [NYSE:BMC], is a leader in enterprise management. The company focuses on Assuring Business Availability® for its customers by helping them proactively improve service, reduce costs, and increase value to their business. BMC Software solutions span enterprise systems, applications, and databases. Founded in 1980, BMC Software has offices worldwide and is a member of the S&P 500, with fiscal year 2002 revenues of approximately $1.3 billion. Visit www.bmc.com to learn more.