If you’re new to BASIS administration then you’ll know that this specialist role is a key one in the running of SAP systems...
You personally, may have come from the software developer side of IT or you may have been a database administrator or a systems administrator of UNIX or Windows operating systems. Whatever your background, there are many functions that you will need to be familiar with in your new role but here are three particularly important ones that you should master and remember the purpose of.
SE16N – The Data Browser
This is your fastest way to inspect a database table through the SAP application layer. You can use SE16N to browse legacy formats as well such as transparent, pool and cluster tables. Of course you probably don’t have access to SE16 (older version) or SE16N in your productive SAP system but under exceptional circumstance you can be granted approval to use this transaction. Data is displayed in a grid format and you have the option to use variants also with SE16N. Since the introduction of HANA as a database alternative to Oracle and SQLServer you can now also use the SE16H alternative. SE16S and SE16SL are also new TCodes for use with HANA databases and allow you to find any values in any tables. You can learn more about these new capabilities by checking out SAP KBA article 2002588 - CO-OM Tools: Documentation for SE16S, SE16SL, and SE16S_CUST
SE37 – The Function Builder
This is principally targeted at the developer or functional consultant who wishes to examine the functionality of a BAPI or function module. An added benefit of using SE37 is that you can use test data and save it for use with a given BAPI or function module. Even if you are not an ABAP developer, often, as a BASIS administrator you will be tasked with trying to work out why things are not quite going according to plan – using SE37 to set things like breakpoints and debug functions in the system will become an indispensable aspect of your role. This is also a transaction that you typically won’t have access to in production
ST03N – The Workload Monitor
This is a transaction used to examine system workload and performance statistics and is principally use to verify system performance at the SAP instance level. You can also access the data associated with ST03N from the SAP collector logs using function module SWNC_GET_WORKLOAD_STATISTIC (execute this with SE37) – although the collector logs are not a 100% guarantee of all SAP events being logged, it does give you, as a BASIS administrator, insight into users. You can determine their activity and the transactions that they are using along with the frequency of use. ST03N should also be seen together with UPL – a new piece of functionality available in any ABAP based system and which is based on the core functionality of the SAP Coverage Analyzer. UPL stands for Usage and Procedure Logging and has full reporting capabilities with enriched information sets in the Business Warehouse of Solution Manager 7.1 SP5 and higher. UPL complements ST03N ABAP workload statistics.