Acute performance analysis
In the classic case, consultants and administrators are made aware of performance problems as part of incident management. By this time, however, it is usually too late – users are already dissatisfied, slowed business processes cost money, and in the case of systems with customer access, they have already migrated to a competitor.
Proactive performance management
The keyword for preventing these problems is “proactive performance management”. Costs incurred when business processes do not work or do not work fast enough quickly exceed the costs incurred for proactive performance analysis.
At a minimum, basic performance analysis should be performed at the time of go-live – after upgrades, when the number of users increases, or when larger amounts of data are transferred. In addition, performance indicators should be monitored on an ongoing basis. SAP offers various methods for this purpose. These include the SAP EarlyWatch Alert, the SAP GoingLive Check, and also metrics in CCMS and SAP Solution Manager. Other non-SAP tools are usually offered by the respective manufacturers of the network, hardware, and database components. Tools from popular cloud providers also help.
Data management
A topic not to be neglected for proactive performance management is data management. This includes avoiding data overhead, archiving, and data reorganization. As a result, there is also a performance advantage for maintenance work, e.g. in backup/recovery, but also for upgrades, migrations and system copies.