How to identify parent job of update work process in SAP

This SAP article will guide you all about “How to identify parent job of update work process in SAP” step by step with screenshots.

You spot a long running SAP update work process via work process monitor (SAP SM50 or SM66) or /SDF/MON utilities in a SAP system, you would like to know the parent job/program which is generating the update process. So you can work with corresponding owner to tune the corresponding job/program to make updating more efficient. This can be straightforward when update process is belonged to a SAP user and the user executes only one transaction. Or this can be a little tricking when an updating process is belonged to a SAP user which is shared by many concurrent SAP jobs. This post would show you how to use STAD to identify the parent of an update work process via an example.

Steps to identify parent job of update work process in SAP

1 long running updating process showed in /SDF/MON

I found a long updating processes under SAP user BGOMUSER which is common background user-id used by hundreds of SAP background jobs in our system. The updating started after 03:16 and finished before 03:33 using work process 209 based on /SDF/MON snapshots which were take every minute in our system. The duration of updating lasted about 17 minutes ( 1,080 seconds) Who is the parents job of this long running update process?

Figure 1 a long running SAP update process in /SDF/MON

2. How to use STAD to identify the parent job/program of an updating process?

Identify transaction steps, then you can use “client record” of the transaction step to identify the parent job/program. If no client record is available, then change STAD display mode from default mode to display “business transaction total/summary” to find parent transaction step and the parent job.

2.1 Identify associated SAP STAD statistics record

I ran STAD to pull out SAP statistics records related to update tasks for the interested period from the server where update work process ran. Following is a small part of the STAD result screen.

Figure 2 STAD records for SAP update tasks

Each line is for statistics from a transaction step. The 1st line on Figure 2 is the transaction step related to long updating process showed in Figure 1 based on time when the transaction step was started, WP( *9 ), duration(1,007 seconds), and useriD(BGOMUSR). Here, WP “*9″ is displayed instead of 209. this is due to the fact that length of WP field length is 2 – in old version a SAP system is assuming that work process number is between 0- 99. But in our system, our work process number is already over 100, so there is overflow in STAD for work process number when a system has over 100 SAP work processes configured.

2.2 Identify a parent of an update work process via client info of a transaction step statistics

Here, I would find out the parent of 2nd update transaction step QA11 under user “*9120″ in Figure 2 first. I double clicked 2nd line and I got statistics details screen for the 2nd step. Figure 3 is a part of STAD details screen

Figure 3 STAD details screen – Client Info button

Figure 3 shows a button “Client Info”. I clicked it once then I got Figure 4 screen which shows the parent job in field “Initial action” among other information.

Figure 4 STAD details screen – client info details

Figure 4 tells us that the parent of the updating process is program “RQEEAM10″ which was executed by an SAP user online. So when client record of STAD is available, we can identify the parent of a transaction step.

Following the same approach, I double clicked the 1st line of Figure 2, I got figure 5 screen which has no “client info”, so where can I find its’ parent in this case?

Figure 5 STAD details screen – NO client info

2.3 Identify parent of an update process via STAD display mode – business transaction total/sums

Since the details record has no “client info” for me to identify the parent program, I changed STAD display mode from the default mode “Show all Stats records, Sorted by time” to “Show Business transaction Total”, then I loop through the record to identify the parent which contains the updating record, Please see the figure 6.

Figure 6 STAD Business transaction total screen – long update process

Now, we know that the parent of this long update process is a SAP background job and the job name is “Invoice_140320*”.

If you do not see the job name or program name displayed, you can try to use “client-info” of the parent line as showed in Figure 7 and Figure 8

Figure 7 STAD business transaction total – no parent job showed

Figure 8 Client info of a parent line for long update process

3. Further information

Here I talked on how to find parent of a completed updating process. If you are sure that an user id is used exclusively to execute a job, then you can be sure that update process under that user should be related to the batch job and you can use SM37 to find the job and so on.

RFC call is normally handled via SAP Dialog Work process. It is normal that those RFC are under a common user which can be used by many concurrent processes. RFC call can be from the program/job which is running in the same system or remote system. The same system means RFC client and RFC server are in the same system. Remote means that RFC call is from different system. You might wonder how to find a parent of RFC process in those cases. In this context, parent is actually the client which is making the RFC call. In short, you can use STAD client info to find a parent process of RFC call as well.

Now, you must have got clear idea about “How to identify parent job of update work process in SAP”.

How to identify parent job of update work process in SAP