SAP System Administrator diary

Sometimes some newbie SAP administrators are wondering what to do on a daily basis, what to
check, how to check, what does it mean a strange message, etc.
Of course a lot of companies have their own procedures for System Administration and
Monitoring. Here I will give an example what could be checked and what should be paid more
attention to.
These transactions I will explain in more details one by one in separate postings. Here they are
included in brief.

List of SAP Systems you can see with transaction SM51. Actually a lot of other transactions
could be started from here.
One of the most important things is the System Log. The transaction for it is SM21. Here you
can see a lot of information, warning and error messages. Of course error messages should be
treat with big attention, but all other should be checked as well.
The next one are Short Dumps. Their appearance is logged in the System Log. So, if you found
a message for a short dump, you could start transaction ST22 and check the dumps.
Next could be check of database activities and performance via transaction ST04 or ST04N. You
can see current activities, some useful and important indicators.
Batch job activities are also important as well as regular users activities. Some batch jobs are
very important especially from business point of view. SM37 will help you in this case to find
whether all is OK or there are some jobs failed.
SMQ1 and SMQ2 will give you an overview of Outbound and Inbound queues in the system if
there are communication with other systems, i.e. R/3 with CRM, CRM with BI, BI with R/3,
CRM and SCM, etc.
Database backups are also very important, because in case of failure the presence of backups is
only thing that could help to recover the systems. DB12 is the transaction you can use to check
database backups as well as archiving of online redo log files.
SLG1 give you an opportunity to check the Application Log.
SM50 – the status of Work Processes on the instance where you are logged.
SM66 – System-wide Work Processes Overview.
SM12 – Display and delete Locks on SAP level.
SM13 – Administrate Update Records.
ST03N – Performance, SAP Statistics, Workload – very useful transaction.
ST02 – Tune summary – buffers, memory, etc.
ST06 – Operating System Monitor.
ST05 – Performance Analysis – it is used on demand for SQL, Enqueue, RFC or Buffer trace.

There are a lot of other transactions for System Administrators. Some of them are dependant of
the system itself. These ones are valid for all kind of SAP systems.