How to analyse failed SAP APO background jobs

This article has been written based on professional experience in various SAP domain and requires a little work knowledge spent on SAP in SAP background job monitoring.  In SAP industry background jobs plays a immense role in terms of data loading, routine tasks, planning etc . Hence need to maintain them we keep monitoring them. Now this article is about how problems occur with them in real time and what to do then or how to solve them. We will also discuss some SAP provided tool they have given to solve them or analyze them.

Prerequisite: Yes off course, here also we have prerequisite. Below Authorizations are needed for this activity.

1.  ST12, ST22, ST05, SM12, SM50, SM21
2.  All Job related T code access
3.  All ALE/IDOC related ( * if  it’s there )
4.  All CIF related ( * if it’s there )
5.  All basic T codes module specific ( like ABAP_DISPLAY,          SD_MM_PP_DISPLAY, APO_DP_SNP_CIF_DISPLAY, )
6. Some Change access T code : SM36, SM37, RSPC ( for solution )
7. BASIS ( for support)

Now it depends upon the project structure that one person or team can have all authorization. Generally BASIS/TECHNICAL team has system related T codes which are required here also.

Here is couple of points we should know before starting.

All we know that form SM37 we can check any job with its name date etc. But we should also know how the job has been triggered and from where. Background job can be scheduled form process chain in system ( T code RSPC ) , from other 3^rd party scheduler software ( like *****) , from normal SAP job scheduler ( T code SM36 ). Problem with Process chain is that, different process chain steps can have a same job name in SM37, so we have to identify them with job steps & variant. Sometimes while monitoring from 3^rd party software, we have found a gap in status update of failed job in SAP. So we should know how those jobs have been scheduled in system so that we should have on right place to start with. If schedules normally from SM36, then job name & user name. If possible, We also should know also know if there is any KPI is mentioned for those jobs in terms of DATA volume so that we can have a idea how many time it’s going to take to complete.

WHAT TO DO IF JOB FAILS:

We can easily check if the job has failed in SM37.