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Use

The Performance Trace tool enables developers, administrators, support consultants, and end users to monitor system performance at service call level. You can trace the performance of both the SAP Business Suite backend system (SAP Gateway: Backend Tracing Tools, transaction /IWBEP/TRACES) and the SAP Gateway hub system (SAP Gateway: Tracing Tools, transaction /IWFND/TRACES).

Configuration and Activation

For more information about how to configure and activate the Performance Trace Tool, see Configuring Tracing Tools.

Performance Trace Analysis

After you have configured and saved the Performance Trace and started an accompanying OData service call, you can display detailed service call information that has been recorded by the trace function. Choose the Performance Trace tab to obtain a tabular overview. As standard the active trace is valid for two hours so all services calls executed within this time are listed in the table.

All service calls triggered since you activated the Performance Trace are listed in chronological order with the newest listed at the top.

The table displays:
  • Service call info
  • HTTP method (for example, POST or GET)
  • Processing time (in milliseconds)
  • Application time (in milliseconds)
  • Request size (in bytes)
  • Response size (in bytes)
  • Response format (xml, xlsx, json)
  • Date
  • Time
  • Expiry date
  • Status

If you want to display additional information about one or more service calls, select the relevant entry lines and choose Display. The Performance Trace Summary screen is displayed.

Performance Trace Summary

You can display a summary of performance traces to track system performance for one or more service calls. The summary screen provides details about the average duration of communication between the consumer, hub system, RFC call, and backend system, for example. This enables you to ascertain the average time required for particular parts of the service call.

The summary displays:
  • Number of requests
  • Total request processing time
  • SAP GW Hub System: processing time in SAP Gateway hub system
  • RFC & Network Overhead: processing time for communication overhead between the hub and backend system
  • SAP GW Backend Framework Overhead: processing time for communication overhead without the application time
  • Application (Data Provider): application time

You can calculate the time for the SAP Gateway hub system and the SAP Business Suite backend system from the start and stop time for each component call and calculating the duration (stack like for calls and subcalls). The backend system provides the framework and application times to the SAP Gateway hub system. The communication overhead is calculated as the difference between the RFC call in the hub system and the total backend time. To display detailed information (such as the number of subcalls, location, agent, class, method, and duration) for a particular entry, select the relevant row in the Detail table and choose Trace Details. A detailed overview for the selected trace is displayed in a new window. If the detail view includes numerous occurrences of metadata access in the Agent column and no further changes have been made to the backend data after you have run the Performance Trace for a second time, you are advised to check the Customizing settings in the SAP Implmenetation Guide. Numerous metadata access calls will otherwise result in misleading performance trace results.

In the detail view, you can choose:
  • Request URL to display the entire URI request in a separate window.

  • Trace Details for an overview of subcalls, level, location, class, method, and duration and net time in milliseconds.

    From here you can navigate to Error Log, view the Source Code and Request URI, or navigate to the Payload Trace.

  • Payload Trace for an overview of the payload trace for the selected service call.
Expiry Date of Performance Trace Log Items

As default, log items are stored for the duration of two days starting from the date on which you started the active trace. However, you can change the expiry date for entries stored in the log for your own needs. To define the expiry date, select the log items for which you want to change the expiry date and choose the Change Expiry Date icon. In the Set new expiry date dialog box, enter the new expiry date. You can access a calendar in which you can select the new expiry date directly by choosing the field help. Save yur setting by choosing the green checkmark.

Search Trace

A search functon is available so you can find traces easily that have been recorded for an earlier date or time although the original configuration is no longer displayed. You might want to use this search function to search for trace recordings activated by a different user, for example. On the initial SAP Gateway Tracing Tools screen, you can start the search function to find traces according to specific search criteria. To start the function, choose Start of the navigation path Tools Next navigation step Search Traces Next navigation step Performance Trace End of the navigation path.

The search function allows you to search traces (for today or all) according to the following criteria:
  • User Name
  • Requested URI Part
  • Request ID: identifier sent from consumer to SAP Gateway
  • Transaction ID
Performance Trace API for Applications

The Performance Trace tool in SAP Gateway backend system (SAP Gateway: Backend Tracing Tools, transaction /IWBEP/TRACES) provides a performance trace API for applications that is defined in class /IWBEP/CL_DIAGNOSTICS_FACADE. This API enables data providers to measure the performance of request processing in the same way as the SAP Gateway Framework. While data providers can call this API as standard, you must first activate this trace in transaction /IWBEP/TRACES if you want data to be written. To monitor the performance trace results in the backend system, use transaction /IWBEP/TRACES similar to the transaction /IWFND/TRACES you use to monitor the results in the SAP Gateway hub system.