Operating System Administration

This will be another short section on operating system administration from a SAP viewpoint, I have covered various flavors of
Unix/Linux in my Common Unix Commands cheat sheet. It does not matter how well you configure/tune SAP or the database if
the underlying operating system is not performing well then SAP will not perform well. Now days the operating system is a
virtual machine running along side other virtual machines ( I have section on VMware if you are interest in virtualization) the
physical machine that virtualization uses normally connects to a external disk source known as a SAN, (I have
covered EMC and NetApp SANs). All these various components need to be tuned and configured correctly.
The most common task is to check that the operating system has enough resources regarding CPU,memory and disk space
(know as a file system), if any of these resources are not adequate then the SAP performance will be degraded, it is important to
monitor this resources constantly, this were monitoring tools are needed as you cannot monitor a system 24 hours 365 days a
year, the monitoring tool should also have alerting capabilities.
In the SAP system there are a number of objects that can consume a large amount of memory and filesystem space
Transport requests
Support packages
Extract files from the SAP system
Program logs
Backup logs
Error logs
Inbound interface files
Third-party programs that store data outside the SAP database
Trace files
Spool files
Lucky the SAP comes with a full time monitor with alerting capabilities called Computer Center Management System Alert
Monitor (CCMS), I already have covered this in my System Monitoring section, so I will not be covering here.
There are times when you need to cleardown the filesystem to reduce disk space (you can add additional disk space but this
costs), first we will look at trace files, which are files that log work processes and their actions, every work process has its own
file and the file is stored at the filesystem level and if left running can consume vast amounts of disk space.
Trace files
# Check the below directory
/usr/sap/<SID>/DVEMGS00/work
# There are two types of trace files RFC and Work process
dev_rfc<number>[.old]
dev_w<number>[.old]


You can save and then delete these trace files using transaction code SM50, first highlight the work process, then using
the administration menu select trace -> save as local file, once saved locally then reset the process by selecting trace -> reset ->
work process files, you will need to confirm the deletion. You can now delete the .old files from the filesystem

Print or output requests, background jobs and running batch input sessions all generate files at the operating system level, the file
size depends on the scope of the respective request or log, check the following directories, before remove any files check
confirm with the owner that they are not needed
Job logs
/usr/sap/<SID>/SYS/global/<client>JOBLG

use transaction code SM37 to view background jobs

Spool Requests
/usr/sap/<SID>/SYS/global/<client>SPOOL

use transaction code SP01 to view spool requests
Batch Input Session
/usr/sap/<SID>/SYS/global/<client>BDCLG

use transaction code SM35 to batch input sessions
You use support packages or support package stacks to import corrections or enhancements into your SAP system, these are
obtained generally from the SAP portal, the packages are copied into the /usr/sap/trans/EP/in directory, once successfully
imported they can be deleted

Transport files are used to transport objects and customizing changes to different SAP systems, they can be quite large and
consume vast amounts of space, they main directory is /usr/sap/trans then there are three directories underneath this data,
cofiles and logs

Operating System Information
SAP comes with its own operating system monitor program called SAPOSCOL, it is part of the SAP kernel and runs at the
operating system level it can detect operating system performance problems, again operating systems generally have there own
monitoring tools. You can use transaction code OS06, the initial screen does not look much but selecting the detail analysis
menu exposes all components of the operating system, there are many statistics located here, you can also check to see if the
SAPOSCOL is running by selecting the operating system collector button,


Here is an example of the top cpu users

You can see average statistics over a period of time, here you can use this information for capacity planning, again many of
these tools are available in the operating system already, for example vmstat, top, iostat can be used in the Unix world.