Working with the Workload Monitor

You call the initial screen of the workload monitor via the following menu path:

TOOLS • ADMINISTRATION • MONITOR • PERFORMANCE • WORKLOAD • AGGREGATED STATISTICS RECORDS-LOCAL

Alternatively, you can use Transaction ST03 or TransactionST03N.

Roles in the workload monitor

The upper-left area of the screen includes a button with which you can select a role. There are two roles:

->Expert
This is the standard user mode. This mode enables users to access all functions available in Transaction ST03. You can display all available system load data (daily, weekly, and monthly). In addition, in this mode, you can display functions related to the data collector.
->Service engineer
This mode gives you the system load statistics for the current day and the previous week, an overview of the history and distribution of the workload, and a detailed analysis of system load. By default, the system displays all the statistics for all application servers.

Selecting instance and period

Also in the upper-left area of the screen, you can select the SAP instance
that you want to analyze  or TOTAL if you want to analyze the entire SAP system. You can also select the period of time for the analysis.

Selecting the profile

In the lower-left area of the ANALYSIS VIEWS SCREEN, you select the different load profiles of the workload monitor with which a detailed analysis of load distribution and response times is possible. There, you can select profiles for the technical analyses (such as TASK TYPE PROFILE, TIME PROFILE, COMPUTER PROFILE, and MEMORY PROFILE), as well as profiles for application analyses (such as TRANSACTION PROFILE, USER PROFILE, CLIENT PROFILE, and ACCOUNTING PROFILE). First, select the profile WoRKLOAD OvERVIEW, which we will discuss below. 

Administrative information

You will find administration information in the upper-right area of the window. The INSTANCE field displays the name of the SAP instance, or TOTAL if you are analyzing the entire SAP system. In the TASK TYPE field, you will find information on which task type you have selected (with the TASK TYPE button in the list of buttons). Using the data for PERIOD, FIRST RECORD, and LAST RECORD, you can check to see whether the collection and compression of data for the selected time period has been done accordingly.

user data

Farther down, you will see statistical data on the performance of the SAP system and information on possible causes of performance problems. If you select the WORKLOAD OVERVIEW analysis view in the lower left, a breakdown of statistics on response times and throughput according to different task types is shown. For the most part, the task types correspond to the work process types DIALOG, UPDATE, UPDATE2, BACKGROUND, and SPOOL However, the DIALOG work process type is further subdivided into the task types DIALOG, RFC, AUTOABAP, BUFFER SYNC, and so on.

Transaction step

The next important values are the number of transaction steps (# STEPS column) and the average response time (%TIME). In a dialog task, a transaction step corresponds to a screen change - that is, to a request that the SAP component executes for a user. The term dialog step might be misleading because transaction steps are performed not only for dialog tasks, but also for background tasks, update tasks, and spool tasks. Processing an update request or spool request is counted as one dialog step by the workload monitor. Similarly, a background program may involve one or more dialog steps. 

Response time

Average response time for a transaction step in the dialog task is seen by many SAP users as the decisive criterion for the performance of an SAP system. Another generally accepted rule of thumb is that good performance in an SAP system is indicated by an average dialog response time of one second. 

Last minute's load

If you are interested in the current load distribution of the last minute, select the function DETAILED ANALYSIS • LAST MINUTE LOAD in the selection tree on the initial screen of the workload monitor. Then, select the period over which the response times are to be averaged (for example, the last 15 minutes) and, if possible, other restrictions. This path also takes you to the LAST MINUTE LOAD view on the main screen of the workload monitor.