Best Technical Practices for SAP Landscape Maintenance

In this post I would like to share my experience on Proactive measures to be taken in a SAP Landscape.

The recommendations are slightly biased towards technical aspects of SAP; hence I would request the readers to only apply them in your own environment after a careful analysis. Thanks for it!

You are most welcome for your suggestions and corrections.

I would like to divide the main topic into 7 sub-components

•     Proactive Measures
•      Performance Optimization
•      Disaster Recovery
•      Problem-Solution Approach
•      Onsite vs Off-shore Support Delivery
•      Upgrades
•      System copies

Proactive Measures

This section emphasizes on key recommendations on preparation aspects to be satisfied for ever-challenging and ongoing performance tuning by Basis, ABAP and Functional Leads. These recommendations might give an impression that they would involve efforts during the initial stages of practice. But indeed this practice yields fruitful results once put in practice. Patience definitely pays! I would also be helping out in getting the intended results indeed by giving examples and code wherever necessary. Before I start just want to ensure the readers that this model works PERFECTLY if basis team works at a client place or close to the client environment. In off-shore support model, implementing these recommendations would be slightly tough. Though, the decision is left for you to decide which of them best suits your needs. I believe now I am ready go into topic.

1. Technical review Tracker:

This can be a Power-point presentation or a Word document depicting the technical aspects based on which the tuning, enhancements and changes can be decided. This presentation is updated twice in month by the Basis Team and will be reviewed by the Technical lead, Functional leads and other influencing persons. The objective of periodic reviews of this presentation would be to achieve the intermediate goals set during the review meetings. Let me be more specific about this presentation. The following are the slides that can be used for this presentation. Keep in mind that this presentation is unique to each SAP system landscape like ECC, BI, PI, SOLMAN, CRM, SRM etc.

1. Hardware Details

2. CPU Utilization of Primary, Additional Apps, Database servers

3. System landscape and the transport route

4. Database space management

5. Buffer Invalidations

6. Top Background Jobs

7. EarlyWatch Recommendations

I would give a brief about each of the above on how it works. H/W details slide shows hostname, RAM, physical/virtual CPUs on the LPAR/Server, CPU entitled capacity, IP address etc. CPU Utilization slide would help in identifying the CPU power bottlenecks and under utilization of CPU. This helps in identifying the SAP components causing the maximum utilization there by optimizing the total performance of the server and also reorganizing the logon groups. This helps especially during month-end releases and COPA activities which imposes maximum impact on the total server performance. Now, database space management slide. As we all know this is very crucial for the overall performance of the SAP server.