Dealing with Printer Spool issues

The SAP spool administration transaction SPAD (full administration option) gives many options of creating new output devices/spool services and administering already existing ones. In transaction SPAD you have the configuration, Administration and Go-To tabs under which there are many useful options. 
Figures from trxn SPAD

With transaction SP01 you can monitor the whole spool request queue or check specific printer spools and check for any warnings or errors.

Process Overview

Sometimes you receive complaints from users on slow system performance. A good place to check on which processes (reports) are being run by which users, how much CPU time and the status of the work process is in transaction SM50 or SM66 ( if you have more than one SAP instance running on the same application server).

Here you get a good overview and if you notice anything unusual i.e a Dialogue work process a very high runtime or in RED then you can contact the indicated user and ask them to either run the report in the background or at off peak hours.

At times the user may be unaware that the report is still indicated as running yet he/she even logged out of the system (for many reasons this may happen!) . In this case you can go to transaction SM04 , search for the user name then highlight the user --> click on sessions TAB then on the new pop up select the session number and click on end session button OR highlight the username --> select USER tab at the screen top --> then Log off user --> system wide

Next time we will delve deeper into the SM04 transaction :-)

JSMON the "secret tool" :-)

I had previously touched on troubleshooting the system when it is not possible to do so via the SAP GUI. That was in the case of the ABAP engine.

In the same case but this time for a JAVA system i.e Employee Self Service/Manager Self service , Supplier Relationship management portal or any other portal system , there is a very helpful tool that not many admins are aware of cal JSMON.

For systems running on UNIX you will need to grep the SAP java process by using either ps -ef | grep sap or s -ef | grep java as <sid>adm user.Then identify the process with this path
pf=/usr/sap/<SID>/SYS/profile/<SID>_J00_<system name> . Once you find the path , then type the command jsmon followed by the path above ...i.e >jsmon pf=/usr/sap/<SID>/SYS/profile/<SID>_J00_<system name>

the image below shows what you should get. Thereafter you can execute a couple of commands which all need to start with jsmon e.g and most important is >jsmon view

This gives you information on the instance state and a good place to start is to check if all processes are running. If the system is down it may show "some processes running or run mode "invalid license"  , for the former error you may try to restart the SAP JAVA instance and for the latter you need to check the license validity in the SAP Portal NWA, you may need to apply a new license if it has expired.

Troubleshooting when the SAP application is down

At times the application may be unavailable or have "crashed" , in this case you do not have the advantage of using SAP GUI tools or transactions to check for the logs since you cannot even log into the SAP GUI!

A good point to start would be to check whether the SAP and Database processes are running in the OS and the available.log file in /usr/sap/<SID>/DVE*/work directory On UNIX platforms and "grep" command can be used while in Windows the task manager would be a good place to check. E.g in UNIX ps -ef | grep sap , if SAP is running then there should be many processes with process IDs and username <SID>adm and for database e.g ORACLE use ps -ef | grep ora 

If few or no SAP processes are listed you can try to restart SAP plus the DB and check the startsap log file and startdb log file in the /home/<SID>adm and /home/ora<SID> directories consecutively.

Depending on what you find from the log files and above steps , various solutions may follow. But other checks you may have to do is check the database listener if it is running , (as orasid user ./lsnrctl status )

Or check if the database is actually mounted and open ( at SQL> prompt select some data from TAB).

***another tool i found to give very useful information is the R3trans -x command on UNIX 

WHAT COULD BE WRONG!

Yes indeed SAP systems can be great and "unbreakable" like all things made in Germany , but boy when things go wrong you really need to figure out what is the problem FAST!

One thing you need to remember is SAP like most applications runs on 3 tier architecture , right at the top is the SAP application server or instance, then the database layer and finally the Operating system. And users access the application layer via the network using a GUI (graphical user interface).

So when a user or the help desk informs you either "SAP is down" or "SAP is too slow" or "I cant access SAP" then it could be any of those layers above having a problem but for this blog i will only focus on the SAP application layer issues....enjoy !