UNRAVELLING SAP BACKGROUND PROCESS SCHEDULING AND WORKLOAD MANAGEMENT

ACHIEVING CONSISTENT AND RELIABLE PROCESSING IMPROVING AND PROTECTING CRITICAL WORKLOAD THROUGHPUT OPTIMIZING HARDWARE RESOURCES A COMPARISON OF SAP JOB SCHEDULING SOLUTIONS

Background
SAP background (batch) job processing plays a pivotal role within all SAP environments from the small single instance to the very largest multi-instance, multi-module implementations. It is, however, still vastly overlooked as a key area where huge gains can be made to your SAP processing throughput speeds and consistency, along with a significant reduction in human maintenance overheads and hardware resource utilization. SAP background processing is traditionally very resource intensive, in terms of both human management (to ensure that critical processes run in a timely and accurate manner) and in hardware utilization with a large percentage of your SAP processing power being used for background processes. Added to that, it is now an almost ubiquitous requirement to schedule, execute and manage background processes across many different SAP systems and non-SAP systems in a seamless and centralized manner, to provide end-to-end business process management. This has led to an unprecedented improvement in the number of options available to SAP customers designed to improve their background processing speeds and reliability, reduce their human and system overheads associated with background processing and to provide them with a common enterprise wide platform for background scheduling which can be visualized, executed and managed centrally.

This paper explores those options, describes the main differences between them and, most importantly, details the value and benefits that you can expect to derive from each option.

Categories of SAP Job Scheduling Solutions

For the purposes of this document and specifically for comparison purposes, we have defined 3 main category of SAP Job Scheduler: The standard in-built SAP CCMS Scheduler (transactions SM36 & SM37), Third Party External Schedulers (such as IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler,
Standard SAP: CCMS transactions SM36/SM37 Basic date / time initiated job scheduling Linear job step chains Basic parallelization of process chains within BI

UC4 and BMC Control-M) and SAP Central Process Scheduling V8 (SAP CPS). SAP CPS V8 is a culmination of 5 years joint development by SAP and Redwood Software and is now a true extension of the core SAP system, especially considering that the latest version is fully embedded within Netweaver 7 and is very tightly integrated with Solution Manager. The first thing to note about SAP CPS is that it is effectively developed as an SAP product that is licensed, validated and supported directly by SAP.
SAP Central Process Scheduling by Redwood Event based dynamic scheduling and support for multiple SAP and non-SAP preconditions and events SAP Workload Management for scheduled and non-scheduled batch workloads Context driven process chains via variables and real-time SAP variant creation and replacement. Interception and Management of non-scheduled SAP workloads (user and system initiated) Visibility and management of all child (spawned) processes Hardware Load Balancing Tight Solution Manager Integration for centralized Job Scheduling Management and documentation Netweaver Deployed Special integration with IS-U and SAP FI Financial Closing Cockpit Advanced recovery and restart automation Integrated SAP UME Security Fast import/migration from other scheduling solutions

Third Party Scheduling Systems (IBM Tivoli, BMC Control-M, UC4 etc.) Parallel job processing chains (advanced, complex predecessor / successor relationships) Cross system, enterprise wide scheduling Centralized management, monitoring and alerting Graphical job/process chain views Basic event based triggering (typically only file events rather than SAP events) Some automated restart functionality

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UNRAVELLING SAP BACKGROUND PROCESS SCHEDULING AND WORKLOAD AUTOMATION

Previous versions of SAP CPS (V7 and before) were heavily modelled on a scheduling product called Cronacle by Redwood Software whereas the newly Generally Available version of SAP CPS for Netweaver 7 (also referred to as SAP CPS v8) has been extensively redeveloped jointly by Redwood and SAP to play a hugely strategic role within SAP's future roadmap of process automation, workload management and centralized SAP management via Solution Manager. SAP CPS V8 is now fully integrated and shipped with SAP Netweaver where it has the capabilities to respond to, and initiate, SAP events on a far greater scale than that of any of the third party schedulers, which are generally limited to using SAP's standard job scheduling interface (XBP). SAP CPS in particular now plays a pivotal role within Solution Manager providing tight integration into its Job Scheduling Manager (JSM) for centralized business process monitoring, alerting, job documentation and change management. Event Based Job Scheduling A key distinction between SAP CPS and any other third party scheduling system is the fact that SAP CPS is a dynamic, event driven scheduler. This means that the old fashioned static date and time based methods of triggering workloads, which are mostly falsely defined (i.e. we think that our file which needs processing will arrive by 21:00 so we will run our job at 21:30 to be on the safe side), can be replaced with true pre-conditions and triggers, for instance, file arrivals, SAP PI messages, Solution Manager events, IDOCS arrivals etc. These triggers and preconditions can be used in any combination to provide extremely sophisticated process management (for example, if we receive message XXX from SAP PI and JOB A and JOB B in the chain have also both completed then run JOB C). This kind of process optimization does not only provide consistent, efficient and reliable processes but it can reduce the end to end execution times by as much as 90%. [based upon an independent IDC study Increased operational efficiency with SAP CPS see Further Reading Section for link]. Context Based Process Automation The SAP CPS event driven dynamic scheduling philosophy also extends to running workloads based upon the context of any pre-conditions. A simple example of this would be to only run some jobs within a job chain if it is a Friday, or month-end for instance. This can vastly reduce the number of job chains that you need to define to SAP CPS as using traditional methods of job scheduling, you are normally required SAP Background Workload Manager. SAP CPS can see and manage all background workloads hitting the SAP Systems (system initiated jobs and also SAP child jobs from BI or IS-U for instance). It can also intercept user submitted workloads and apply standards and rules to determine how and when they should run. Having CPS intercept these (often undesirable workloads) means that it protects business critical workloads so that they run on time and according to the correct business priority. It is not uncommon for a user to inadvertently submit a long running job that causes scheduled production jobs to wait on resources or run slowly. During our SAP batch

SAP Job Scheduling and Workload Management is still vastly overlooked as a key area where huge gains can be made to improving business critical SAP processing speeds and consistency, reducing your maintenance overheads and optimizing your hardware

to define multiple job chains for each day of the week. As you can imagine, the change management maintenance overheads can be vastly reduced by building context based schedules. Furthermore, within an SAP environment it is extremely common to see the same ABAP being executed with different variants throughout a batch schedule. SAP CPS requires that you only need to define one job definition per ABAP and at execution time simply pass the name of the variant that you want to use with the ABAP. Add to that the capability if creating or replacing variants at job execution time and you can appreciate that there is some significant power within CPS. We have seen this functionality reduce the number of job definitions by over 60%, again significantly reducing the maintenance overheads and errors associated with batch scheduling.

analysis workshops and SAP CPS implementations weve seen upwards of 20% of the workloads hitting an SAP system to be unscheduled and unmanaged. That accounts for a lot of potential to reclaim valuable processing resources. You can apply rules to CPS to intercept such jobs based on a multitude of criteria to perhaps automatically hold these jobs to run at a more desirable time, or to run them on a different system, or to not allow them to run at all. Interception rules can even be applied to have CPS examine the variants being used and ensure that jobs are not submitted with wildcard variants which are well know to cause serious system degradation.

Similarly, SAP CPS can respond to many other types of SAP events and change priorities of workloads accordingly: for instance, if Solution Manager detects that online dialogue times are running SAP Workload Management below a required SLA, then CPS can detect this condition and automatically SAP CPS is not only responsible for job throttle certain workloads via its scheduling within SAP, it also acts as the queuing system to release more

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UNRAVELLING SAP BACKGROUND PROCESS SCHEDULING AND WORKLOAD AUTOMATION

resources to online dialogues. Adaptive Computing SAP CPS is also SAP's method of providing true workload balancing (or if you prefer, hardware virtualization) for SAP background processing. SAP CPS constantly monitors the CPU loads and Paging Rates of the underlying Application Servers and submits work accordingly to balance the workloads. The IDC study showed that peak hardware usage was reduced by up to 33% by this capability alone. Centralized Management and Auditing SAP CPS has a centralized management and monitoring facility that is used to define and execute system wide schedules. Every job definition can be associated with a business process owner along with strict security rules governing which userid the job executes under and of course who can view or change any particular job or group of jobs within. This provides for a very granular level of auditability which will pass even the strictest of compliance regulations. SAP CPS Adoption Strategy These capabilities have led to an interesting shift within the SAP user base because, although SAP CPS has the capabilities to schedule across nonSAP systems and is a true Enterprise Wide Job Scheduler (comparing equally with Control-M, UC4, Tivoli etc. in this respect), the huge additional value and uniqueness of CPS's capabilities within an SAP environment and it's strategic future within the SAP landscape has lead to many companies adopting a coexistence strategy whereby SAP CPS is being used to schedule and manage all SAP workloads whilst still continuing to use an incumbent third party scheduling system for scheduling outside SAP. This co-existence strategy is not complex or difficult to achieve as CPS job schedules can easily be triggered for execution from an external third party scheduler (and vice versa) to provide seamless integration between schedulers. SAP CPS Installation & Versions The installation of SAP CPS V8 is also made much simpler now that it is a core part of Netweaver. No longer are you required to have a separate Oracle database as per previous versions, SAP CPS now uses whichever underlying database you have installed for your central Netweaver instance. There are two versions of SAP CPS available, a non-chargeable version, which can be downloaded from SAP Marketplace, and a chargeable version which is licensed by the number of Process Servers you install. Both versions are essentially the same from a user perspective, however, the freely available version is restricted to scheduling CCMS jobs only (i.e. no O/S or non-SAP jobs) and it will not allow cross system scheduling. Advanced functionality such as mass activity processing and integration with Financial Closing Cockpit is also not available with the free version. SAP Batch Workload Analysis Workshops The best way to ascertain the potential value you could derive from the implementation of SAP CPS is to undertake a one or two day workshop. During this workshop we are able to analyse the volumes and types of batch workloads being processed on your SAP systems and will be able to give you a very good assessment of the levels of improvements that can be made by applying SAP Workload Management and from optimizing your SAP job schedules. Please use the contact details below if you would like to talk in more detail about this paper or would like to arrange a workshop or more detailed presentation of SAP CPS.

The huge additional value and uniqueness of SAP CPS's capabilities within an SAP environment, along with it's strategic future within the SAP landscape has led to many companies adopting a co-existence strategy whereby SAP CPS is being used to schedule and manage all SAP workloads whilst still continuing to use an incumbent third party scheduling system for scheduling outside SAP

Recommended Further Reading

SAP Central Process Scheduling: Streamlining the Scheduling Process (Solution Brief) (PDF 168 KB) SAP Central Process Scheduling by Redwood (SAP Solution in Detail) Expect More From Your Job Scheduling Solution (SAP Insider Article) Technical Brief SAP CPS Integration with SAP Solution Manager (PDF 725 KB) (PDF 863KB)

(PDF 725 KB) (PDF 190KB)

SAP CPS Increasing the Value of the SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence SAP Central Process Scheduling: Frequently Asked Questions

(PDF 297 KB) (PDF 120KB)

SAP Central Process Scheduling Advanced Automation and Monitoring SAP CPS Versions and Functionality Overview (PDF 192 KB)

IDC Report Increased Operational Efficiency with SAP CPS (PDF 212 KB)

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