There are many use cases for deploying a tool to monitor your SAP system. Releasing your application between test environments, introducing additional users to your production system, or developing new functionality—all of these introduce an element of risk to your application and environment. Whether you are upgrading to SAP HANA, moving data centres, or expanding your use of ECC modules or mobile interfaces (Fiori), you can help mitigate the risk with the insights SAP PowerConnect for Splunk provides.
Upgrading SAP
Before you begin upgrades to your SAP landscape, you need to verify several prerequisites such as hardware and OS requirements, source release of the SAP system, and background process volumes. There are increased memory, session, and process requirements when performing the upgrade, which need to be managed. The SAP PowerConnect solution provides you with all key information about how your system is responding during the transition, with up-to-date process, database, and system usage information.
Triaging and correlating events or incidents is also easier than ever with PowerConnect through its ability to time series historic information. It means you can look back to a specific point in time and see what the health of the system or specific server was, the configuration settings, etc. This is a particularly useful feature for regression testing.
Supporting application and infrastructure migration
Migration poses risks. It’s critical to mitigate those risks through diligent preparation, whether it’s ensuring your current code works on the new platform or that the underlying infrastructure will be fit for purpose.
For example, when planning a migration from an ABAP-based system to an on-premise SAP HANA landscape, there are several migration strategies you can take, depending on how quickly you want to move and what data you want to bring across. With a greenfield deployment, you start from a clean setup and bring across only what you need. The other end of the spectrum is a one-step upgrade with a database migration option (DMO), where you migrate in-place.
Each option will have its own advantages and drawbacks; however, both benefit from the enhanced visibility that PowerConnect provides throughout the deployment and migration process. As code is deployed and patched, PowerConnect will highlight infrastructure resource utilisation issues, greedy processes, and errors from the NetWeaver layer. PowerConnect can also analyse custom ABAP code and investigate events through ABAP code dumps by ID or user.
Increasing user volumes
Deployments can be rolled out in stages, be it through end users or application functionality. This is an effective way to ease users onto the system and lessen the load on both end-user training and support desk tickets due to confusion. As user volume increases, you may find that people don’t behave like you thought they would—meaning your performance test results may not match up with real-world usage. In this case, PowerConnect provides the correlation between the end-user behaviour and the underlying SAP infrastructure performance. This gives you the confidence that if the system starts to experience increased load, you will know about it before it becomes an issue in production. You can also use PowerConnect to learn the new trends in user activity, and feed that information back into the testing cycle to make sure you’re testing as close to real-world scenarios as possible.
It may not be all bad news. PowerConnect can highlight unexpected user behaviour in a positive light, where you might find new users are introduced to the system, they don’t find a feature as popular as you thought they would. Hence you would then be able to turn off the feature to reduce licence usage or opt to promote the feature internally. PowerConnect will not only give you visibility into system resource usage, but also what users are doing on the system to cause that load.
Feedback across the development lifecycle
PowerConnect provides a constant feedback solution with correlation and insights throughout the application delivery lifecycle. Typically migrations, deployments, and upgrades follow a general lifecycle of planning, deploying, then business as usual, before making way for the next patch or version.
During planning and development, you want insights into user activity and the associated infrastructure performance to understand the growth of users over time.
- With the data retention abilities of Splunk, PowerConnect can identify trends from the last hour right back to the last year and beyond. These usage trends can help define performance testing benchmarks by providing concurrent user volumes, peak periods, and what transactions the users are spending time on.
- In the absence of response time SLAs, page load time goals can be defined based on current values from the SAP Web Page Response Times dashboard.
- With the ability to compare parameters, PowerConnect can help you make sure your test and pre-prod environments have the same configuration as production. When the test team doesn’t have access to run RZ10 to view the parameters, a discrepancy can be easy to miss and cause unnecessary delays.
Once in production, PowerConnect also gives you client-centric and client-side insights.
- You can view the different versions of SAP GUI that users have installed or see a world map showing the global distribution of users.
- Splunk can even alert from a SecOps perspective, and notify you if someone logs in from a country outside your user base. You can view a list of audited logins and browse the status of user passwords.
- The power of Splunk gives you the ability to alert or regularly report on trends in the collected data. You can be informed if multiple logins fail, or when the CPU vs Work processes is too high. Automated scripts can be triggered when searches return results so that, for example, a ServiceNow ticket can be raised along with an email alert.
Even after a feature has completed its lifecycle and is ready to be retired, PowerConnect remains rich with historical data describing usage, issues, and configuration settings in Splunk, even if that raw data disappears or has been aggregated from SAP.
Backed by the power of Splunk, and with the wealth of information being collected, the insights provided by PowerConnect will help you effectively manage your SAP system throughout your SAP lifecycle.
Want to find out more?
Find out more about SAP PowerConnect for Splunk and how it can be a key tool for your business in 2018 by attending our event, "Splunkify your SAP data with PowerConnect" in May.
Choose the most convenient location and date for you, and register below. We look forward to seeing you there.
Register in Sydney or Melbourne
Splunk Office
Level 1, 141 Walker Street
North Sydney NSW 2060
[formidable id="17"]
By clicking this button, you submit your information to JDS Australia, who will use it to communicate with you about this event and their other services.
Splunk Office
Level 16, North Tower, 525 Collins Street
Melbourne VIC 3000
[formidable id="20"]
By clicking this button, you submit your information to JDS Australia, who will use it to communicate with you about this event and their other services.
Find out more
To find out more about how JDS can help you implement PowerConnect, contact our team today on 1300 780 432, or email contactus@jds.net.au.
Our team on the case
Work smarter, not harder. (I didn't even come up with that. That's smart.)
Daniel Spavin
Length of Time at JDS
7 years
Skills
IT: HPE Load Runner, HPE Performance Center, HPE SiteScope, HPE BSM, Splunk
Personal: Problem solving, Analytical thinking
Workplace Solutions
I care about quality and helping organisations get the best performance out of their IT projects.
Organisations spend a great deal of time and resources developing IT solutions. You want IT speeding up the process, not holding it up. Ensuring performance is built in means you spend less time fixing your IT solutions, and more time on the problems they solve.
I solve problems in our customers’ solutions, so customers can use their solutions to solve problems.
Focus. Work hard. Stay positive. It always seems impossible until it’s done.
Daniel Tam
Length of Time at JDS
10 years
Skills
I am an experienced Account Manager, with a strong capability for problem-solving and creating the solutions that best match each customer’s unique requirements. I have a demonstrated technical capability across numerous disciplines, including:
- Performance testing
- Application performance monitoring (‘APM’)
- IT Service Management (ITIL 3 certified)
- CMDB, automation and orchestration
Workplace Passion
I have a strong passion for understanding our customers’ unique requirements and helping to create solutions that best solve both their technical and business needs.
Read more Tech Tips

Browser Console
Read More

Glide Variables
Read More

Understanding Database Indexes in ServiceNow
Read More

Fast-track ServiceNow upgrades with Automated Testing Framework (ATF)
Read More

Read More

Splunk .conf18
Read More

ServiceNow Catalog Client Scripts: G_Form Clear Values
Read More

Is DevPerfOps a thing?
Read More

The benefits of performance testing with LoadRunner
Read More

Monitoring Atlassian Suite with AppDynamics
Read More

5 quick tips for customising your SAP data in Splunk
Read More

How to maintain versatility throughout your SAP lifecycle
Read More

How to revitalise your performance testing in SAP
Read More

Reserve and import data through Micro Focus ALM
Read More

How to effectively manage your CMDB in ServiceNow
Read More

ServiceNow and single sign-on
Read More

How to customise the ServiceNow Service Portal
Read More

Integrating a hand-signed signature to an Incident Form in ServiceNow
Read More

Integrating OMi (Operations Manager i) with ServiceNow
Read More

Implementing an electronic signature in ALM
Read More

Service portal simplicity
Read More

Learning from real-world cloud security crises
Read More

Static Variables and Pointers in ServiceNow
Read More

Citrix and web client engagement on an Enterprise system
Read More

Understanding outbound web services in ServiceNow
Read More

How to solve SSL 3 recording issues in HPE VuGen
Read More

How to record Angular JS Single Page Applications (SPA)
Read More

Calculating Pacing for Performance Tests
Read More

Vugen and GitHub Integration
Read More

What’s new in LoadRunner 12.53
Read More

Filtered Reference Fields in ServiceNow
Read More

ServiceNow performance testing tips
Read More

Monitor Dell Foglight Topology Churn with Splunk
Read More

Straight-Through Processing with ServiceNow
Read More

Splunk: Using Regex to Simplify Your Data
Read More

ServiceNow Choice List Dependencies
Read More

Tips for replaying RDP VuGen scripts in BSM or LoadRunner
Read More

Incorporating iSPI metric reports into MyBSM dashboard pages
Read More

Using SV contexts to simulate stored data
Read More

What’s new in LoadRunner 12.02
Read More

Recycle Bin for Quality Center
Read More

LoadRunner Correlation with web_reg_save_param_regexp
Read More

LoadRunner 11.52
Read More

QC for Testers – Quiz
Read More

Agile Performance Tuning with HP Diagnostics
Read More

What’s new in HP Service Virtualization 2.30
Read More

Understanding LoadRunner Virtual User Days (VUDs)
Read More

Problems recording HTTPS with VuGen
Read More

Improving the management and efficiency of QTP execution
Read More

Performance testing Oracle WebCenter with LoadRunner
Read More

Generating custom reports with Quality Center OTA using Python
Read More

Asynchronous Communication: Scripting For Cognos
Read More

How to fix common VuGen recording problems
Read More

Monitoring Active Directory accounts with HP BAC
Read More

URL Attachments in Quality Center
Read More

What’s new in LoadRunner 11.00?
Read More

Restore old License Usage stats after upgrading Quality Center
Read More

Changing LoadRunner/VuGen log options at runtime
Read More

Restricting large attachments in Quality Center
Read More

Retrieving Quality Center user login statistics
Read More

A comparison of open source load testing tools
...
Read More

Worst practices in performance testing
Read More

LoadRunner Sales Questions
Read More

LoadRunner Analysis: Hints and tips
Read More

LoadRunner in Windows 7
HP Loadrunner 11 is now available. This new version now natively supports Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008. I ...
Read More

Using the QuickTest Professional “commuter” license
Read More

Installing HP Diagnostics
Read More

Understanding LoadRunner licensing
Read More

VuGen scripting for YouTube video
Read More

Creating a Web + MMS vuser
Read More

Why you should use backwards dates
Read More

How to get the host’s IP address from within VuGen
Read More

VuGen scripting for BMC Remedy Action Request System 7.1
Read More

Unique usernames for BPM scripts
Read More

Mapping drives for LoadRunner Windows monitoring
Read More

VuGen feature requests
Read More

LoadRunner script completion checklist
Read More

Querying Quality Center user roles
Read More

Querying the Quality Center Database
Read More

HPSU 2009 Presentation – Performance Testing Web 2.0
Read More

Scaling HP Diagnostics
Read More

Global variables aren’t really global in LoadRunner
Read More

Client-side certificates for VuGen
Read More

Detect malicious HTML/JavaScript payloads with WebInspect (e.g. ASPROX, Gumblar, Income Iframe)
Read More

VuGen code snippets
Read More

Integrating QTP with Terminal Emulators
Read More

Why you must add try/catch blocks to Java-based BPM scripts
Read More

Querying a MySQL database with LoadRunner
Read More

ANZTB 2009 Presentation: Performance Testing Web 2.0
Read More

How to make QTP “analog mode” steps more reliable
Read More

Testing multiple browsers in a Standardized Operating Environment (SOE)
Read More

DNS-based load balancing for virtual users
Read More

What’s new in LoadRunner 9.50?
Read More

Calculating the difference between two dates or timestamps
Read More

The “is it done yet” loop
Read More

Think time that cannot be ignored
Read More

Understanding aggregate variance within LoadRunner analysis
Read More

Load balancing vusers without a load balancer
Read More

Harvesting file names with VuGen
Read More

Parameterising Unix/Posix timestamps in VuGen
Read More

HP Software trial license periods
Read More

How to handle HTTP POSTs with a changing number of name-value pairs
Read More

VuGen string comparison behaviour
Read More

Persistent data in VuGen with MySQL
Read More

How to write a Performance Test Plan
Read More

Unable to add virtual machine
To get ...
Read More

LoadRunner scripting languages
Read More

WDiff replacement for VuGen
Read More

Testing web services with a standard Web Vuser
Read More

Why your BPM scripts should use Download Filters
Read More

Querying your web server logs
Read More

Importing IIS Logs into SQL Server
Read More

QTP “Uninstall was not completed” problem
Read More

VuGen correlation for SAP Web Dynpro
Read More

How to save $500 on your HP software license
Read More

Testing and monitoring acronyms
Read More

Solving VuGen script generation errors
Read More

An introduction to SiteScope EMS Topology
Read More

Using the BAC JMX Console
Read More