Thursday, May 19, 2011

Funniest SAP notes ever 4

There we go with another post in this series. This time it is about Report For Fax Tests: 


Quote: “A test requires certain test reports.”












Other post from this series:

Saturday, May 14, 2011

SAP GUI: operational system environment variables

First kindly notice that variables listed below are valid only for WINDOWS operational system. Some of them are very useful (e.g. to set path to ini file). On other hand some of them are not very known (e.g. RFC related ones). The list is not complete for sure; anyways here it is:

  1. SAPLOGON_INI_FILE – location of initialization file (saplogon.ini) with all the entries with connection strings to SAP systems
  2. RFC_TRACE_DIR – location where trace files (rfc*.trc) are stored
  3. SAP_CODEPAGE – to set code page for communication between GUI and SAP system (e.g. UNICODE systems). Used in cased when client has different code page (by default) then server.
  4. RFC_TRACE_TIME – runtime analysis on the external RFC communication
  5. DPTRACE – activating trace can be be activated using this variable
  6. ABTR_TRACE – trace between GUI and RFC; trace is written when this variable is set
  7. TDW_TIMEOUT – specifies timeout of connection to message server by default it is 10 seconds. 
  8. SNC_LIB - variable specifies the path to the gssntlm.dll file.

P.S: in order to set operation system environment variable in WINDOWS use set command. E.g.: SET SAPLOGON_INI_FILE=%APPDATA%\SAP\SAPLOGON.INI

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

SAP End-User Experience Monitoring (EEM)

Have you ever wonder about SAP BW report that was accessible from your location but was not accessible for user located on other half of globe? In such cases we need to consider possible network or infrastructure issues which may pop up. How to make sure that reports are available from all users’ location? You cannot sit everywhere to check out it. Having local IT to check it is in case of small offices also an issue. There must be some way how to automate it. There is a tool for that. It is called SAP End-User Experience Monitoring (EEM) and it basically does the evaluation of IT systems from end user perspective. By this your IT department can be informed about issues up front before users even recognize it. 

In my experience we just used in case of BW for checking either critical BW reports are up and running before users get into the offices. We set up several robots for report checking. Their results were collected in Solution Manager. IT is then notified by SOLMAN about any report outage.

For more details check out SDN’s wiki:

Few more BEx messages 3

Here series of pots related to BEx messages continues. Some month ago I wrote a post about maximum lines that BEx report can display. Here are warning messages related to this topic:

Result set too large (1019760 cells); data retrieval restricted by configuration (maximum = 500000 cells)
Maximum number of rows (65535) exceeded. Result is incomplete. BRAIN 67565535

Anyway conclusion is the same: You cannot get more then 65536 from Excel. For detail see How long BEx report in Excel can be?

More post on that topic:

Funniest SAP notes ever 3

Here we go again J with some funny BW SAP Note:
This time here a message: “This is only a dummy note”:



Other post from this series:

SAP End-to-End Solution Operations

Agree or not but as with every complex software system it is quite high effort to keep it running. SAP is not exception thought. To make it at least survivable SAP is offering as a part of their methodologies so called End-to-End Solution Operations. It is available on SAP Service Marketplace/OSS; under shortcut: service.sap.com/e2e. It is separated to 2 main parts:
·         Business Process Integration & Automation Management
·         End-to-End Change Control Management

For more details refer to following links:

www.sap.com/education/e2e - trainings available:

EW2E40  - RunSAP - End-to-End Solution Operations
EW2E50  - End-to-End Solution Scope and Documentation
EW2E60  - RunSAP Customer Center of Expertise - “Implementing SAP Quality Management”
EW2E100 - E2E Root Cause Analysis
EW2E200 - E2E Change Control Management
EW2E220 - Test Management Overview
EW2E300 - E2E Business Process Integration and Automation Management
EW2E400 - E2E Technical Upgrade Management
EW2E500 - Custom Code Management