Monitoring Long-Running Transactions (Draft)

In SAP systems, long-running transactions refer to business processes or activities that take a significant amount of time to complete. These transactions can have an impact on system performance and overall efficiency. If your SAP system is experiencing performance degradation, it may be due to the long-running job execution time that is caused by an expensive SQL statement. Other causes and side effects of long-running transactions can also show up in areas like waits, blocking, locks, memory bottlenecks, high process, and CPU utilization, and timeouts.

Create Override Threshold for Long-running Background Activity

Getting started with monitoring expensive and long SAP SQL Statements is as simple as defining the recovery activity within the background job threshold override.

1. Navigate to the IT-Conductor main menu → Support → Downloads and download and import the following IT-Conductor SAP Transport Modules into the target SAP System (v6.76.1 IT-Conductor Function Module MS1K900554)

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Figure 1: IT-Conductor Function Modules

2. After importing the transport, you have to define the recovery activity for the job you want to monitor. In this case, let’s define a recovery activity for a background job.

3. Navigate to Target System → Background jobs, then click on the Runtime gear icon → Override.

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Figure 2: Override Option for Background Jobs

4. You may choose to create an override from zero or create an override from a template.

5. Give the override a descriptive name.

6. On the object criteria, fill out the following fields:

   • Elapsed Time

   • Target System (SID)

   • Job Name you wish to track

   • Owner of the job

7. Set the threshold values and the alert message that will be displayed whenever the job elapsed time goes over the defined threshold. The message will display the objects selected in the object criteria section.

8. Under the Recovery section, click on the drop-down arrow for recovery activities and select the predefined recovery activity for background jobs.

9. Click on the Save icon.

When an alert is generated for a long-running job, a recovery action activity will also be triggered.

Tracking In-Flight Time

You may track the time in which a background activity had gone over the previously established elapsed time as well.

1. Navigate to Target System → Background jobs → In-Flight Time.

Monitoring the In-Flight Time is crucial for performance analysis and optimization in SAP environments. This practice aids in tracking the elapsed time of a background job and the duration for which the job has been active and processed. High or unexpected In-Flight Times may indicate potential issues, such as performance bottlenecks or resource constraints.

Utilizing IT-Conductor for monitoring the In-Flight Time ensures the efficient use of resources and timely completion of tasks. The chart below provides a visual representation, and by clicking on a data point, a pop-up window displays a list of jobs and their respective In-Flight times. This view can be expanded, and the time, along with other attributes, can be sorted as required for detailed analysis.