Suite of helpful BW programs – BW Tools (ST13->BW-TOOLS)

I do not remember when was it for 1st time when I found this tool mentioned in SDN’s forums. I think it was related to process chains analyses. This tool covers analyses of process chains run time as well. 

Basically tool is indented to be used predominantly by SAP Active Global Support Team to support performance analysis in the areas of BW-IP (Integrated planning); BW reporting etc. Customers are free to use this tool too (according PPT attachment to note 1035990). Don’t be surprised if TA ST13 is not present in your system. The thing is that tool is coming with ST-A/PI component (Service Tools for Applications Plug-In). ST-A/PI component is so called Service Software Framework used to handle so called SAP EarlyWatch/GoingLive sessions. I was blogging about those sessions before here and here. 

Depending on version of ST-A/PI that you have deployed in your BW system selection screen of TA ST13 may look like:

From this screen kindly observe that those are BW tools available in ST13. More details about particular tools are here:

BIIPTOOLS - BI-IP Performance Toolset This tool has following components:

Planning Activities Overview – TOP x: planning sequence/functions/buffers executed.

BW Statistics Analysis – Provides a list of activities done in system related to BW-IP

FOX Analysis – Analyses FOX codes; recommendations to tune FOX coding

Characteristic Distribution - to analyze how data is distributed in cube’s fact tables

Technical Query Settings – Similar to TA RSRT, difference is that you can check multiple queries

BW Performance Benchmark – As planning functions cannot be distributed to several CPUs of your server this helps to decide either CPU should be upgraded

Prefill OLAP Cache for planning sequence – For OLAP cache pre-filling with required selections of characteristics, done by report ZBPPOIP

 

BPSTOOLS - BW-BPS Performance Toolset Similar set of reports just for BPS based planning

BW-TOOLS - BW Tools This was very first part of ST13 that I discovered a long time ago. It has advanced Process Chain monitoring (several chains in one view with its status, run time, end date/time, drill down to RSPC1,...)

BWATOOLS - BWA Support Tools This is sol called BWA Support Toolkit where you can analyze various standpoint related to your BWA status. See (note 1517326, introducing blog)

BWQUAC_CUST - BW Query Alert Collector Customizing, used for in the Solution Manager Business Process Monitoring.

BW_QUERY_ACCESSES - BW: aggregate/InfoCube accesses of queries Not sure what is purpose of this. I was not able to find any data in this tool.

BW_QUERY_USAGE - BW: query usage statistics Not sure what is purpose of this. I was not able to find any data in this tool.

Update 02/05/2016 for particular tool: the data is read from BI Statistics 3.x table RSDDSTAT which is obsolete in NW 7.x based BW systems. Therefore this tool is not providing any data. 

 

Update on 10/05/2015:

In case tool names are not visible in the popup selection of tcode ST13 you may follow up as described in following post: Uncommenting reports /SSA/* - Service tools for Applications ST-A/PI

Update on 07/12/2016:

ABAP program which is behind t-code ST13 -> BW Tools is /SSA/BWT

Used sources:

http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/BI/BW+Tools

Note 1035990 - GoingLive services for integrated planning - check tool