Purpose

This document is meant to reintroduce the importance of SAP BW’s Technical Content and specifically the BW Administration Cockpit. In the recent years, SAP HANA has stolen much of the spotlight from everything else that is equally important to our existing customers who are not ready to move onto the SAP HANA platform.

While everyone has been busy acquiring knowledge and getting acquitted with the latest SAP HANA capabilities and functions, little did we notice that SAP has sneaked in significant changes to the technical content that we have been so familiar with. For example, an Xcelsius dashboard has been included to provide a management style reporting and installation has become much more straightforward. This article is not meant to discuss the importance of using technical content in a BW environment but to raise the awareness of how easy it is to implement, what the new functionality can address and learnings that we have gathered while enabling this feature.

This document should be use as a guide to enable the BW Administration Cockpit in an environment where this has not been setup yet. The effort is relatively minimal with no significant impact on existing objects but please address the warning messages in the installation log. The estimated effort require to complete this installation from an end to end process should not requirement anywhere greater than 10 hours using a single resource.

Benefits

You may skip this section if you have prior experience with SAP BW’s Technical Content. This section is aim to provide a high level understanding of the importance of using and having visibility of the system’s health thorough use of the generated numerical logs within the BW application.

Aside from the obvious benefits of being of being able to contextualise error and perform analysis, enabling the BW Administration Cockpit is surprising simple. There are no additional licensing costs associated with it and this feature comes as part of the NetWeaver platform. So in essence, you have a free, powerful and insightful tool that if not leverage, will be such a waste.

The advantage of empowering your clients to monitor the health of the system will allows them a greater knowledge to take proactive measure in ensuring everything stays at its optimal level. Having tangible numbers to indicate who their active users are can be a useful communication tool to drive the adoption of BW to the wider community within an organisation. For example, an organisation would have heavily investment in an enterprise warehouse solution and would like to see it being productively used. What better way to feed these information back to the management team on the number of active reporting users, the type of reports that are frequently used and how it is being used. It can also be used as impact assessments mechanism in the event where an underlying BW object needs to be modified and the need to understand what and importantly who it will be affected can save the team a lot of Monday morning hate mail.

  In my opinion, the most beneficial of all in enabling the BW Administration Cockpit is that the information is provided in an Xcelsius dashboard, it is easy to understanding and the information is not overly sensitive. Because of these reasons, I do not see a valid justification for not sharing this information with the larger community. If an organisation uses SAP portal, it can be included as part of the corporate view where it can help to create a culture where information drives decision making and an open and honest view of how the reporting system is performing is a feature everyone can learn to appreciate. Some of the newly provided content such as data consumption by InfoArea is not included into the Xcelsius dashboard but is part of the delivered content. Using this report allows the business to make informed decision on cost e.g. this report will allow the business to allocate the usage cost across different departments and the below sample data indicates that the Finance department is the largest memory consumer therefore cross departmental charges can take place with the appropriate groups. Another sample report, the BW DB Usage report can give you an insight into the trend of the data growth and this can help with hardware sizing by avoiding preventable upgrades by channelling funds to other areas of improvement.