BW SUPPORT RELATED QUESTIONS

Question

Dear All,
I am a BW fresher and currently attending an interview for BW support role.
Could anyone please send me some interview questions mainly focusing on BW SUPPORT related issues??
Thanking you
RAO

Answer 1

HI Rao,
These are the Daily Support processes & related links,
***From SDN
Normally the production support activities include
Scheduling
R/3 Job Monitoring
B/W Job Monitoring
Taking corrective action for failed data loads.
Working on some tickets with small changes in reports or in AWB objects.
The activities in a typical Production Support would be as follows:
1. Data Loading - could be using process chains or manual loads.
2. Resolving urgent user issues - helpline activities
3. Modifying BW reports as per the need of the user.
4. Creating aggregates in Prod system
5. Regression testing when version/patch upgrade is done.
6. Creating adhoc hierarchies.
Also refer these posts:
Re: In production Support , how i can acquire the knowledge
Re: How to resolve tickets  its urgent
Re: production support issues
production support
we can perform the daily activitiesin Production
1. monitoring Dataload failures thru RSMO
2. Monitoring Process Chains Daily/weekly/monthly
3. Perform Change run Hirerachy
4. Check Aggr's Rollup
To add to the above
1)check data targets are ready for reporting,
2) No failed or cancelled jobs in sm37 monitors and Bw Monitor.
3) All requests are loaded for day,monthly and yearly also.
4) Also to note down time taken for loading of critical infocubes which are used for reporting.
5) Is there any break in any schedules from your process chains.
It's totally a client specific tool.
The common features here can be
A ticket Id,
Priority,
Consultant ID/Name,
User ID/Name,
Date of Post,
Resolving Time etc.
There ideally is also a knowledge repositary to search for a similar problem and solutions given if it had occured earlier.
You can also have traning manuals (with screen shots) for simple transactions like viewing a query, saving a workbook etc so that such queried can be addressed by using them.
When the problem is logged on to you as a consultant, you need to analyse the problem, check if you have a smilar problm occured earlier and use ready solutions, find out the exact server on which this has occured etc.
you have to solve the problem(assuming you will have access to the dev sytem) and post the solution and ask the user to test after the preliminary testing from your side.
Get it transported to production once tested and post it as closed i.e the ticket has to be closed.
---If there is a dataload failure, what steps/checks do i need to follow. etc.
it means thats depends upon the failure we need to monitor and take corrective action ..
generally we do in load failures...
ST22 for any shortdumps
sm21 for log entries and
TRF entries
sm12 for any locks
we need to analyze from these t-codes.
changing query/object
-change ticket from open to working.
-get additional details if any required.
-create transport request in dev.
-make the change and save in transport.
-check that transport goes through OK.
-do testing in QA system.
-after testing is OK,get change transported to prod.
-update ticket and resolve it.
-usually helpdesk closes ticket after confirmation with user who raised ticket.
data load failure
-regularly check rsmo(monitor) for data load failures.
-if load fails,get details from details tab of monitor.
-usual errors are:master data missing,special characters in data,datasource not replicated,delta load issues etc.
-get root cause of error,and fix data load manually.
-check that manually updated data is GREEN and available for reporting in data target.
-update ticket and resolve it.
Siggi's weblogs for data load error and how to restart process chain
/people/siegfried.szameitat/blog/2005/07/28/data-load-errors--basic-checks
/people/siegfried.szameitat/blog/2006/02/26/restarting-processchains
1. Why there is frequent load failures during extractions? and how to analyse them?
If these failures are related to Data, there might be data inconsistency in source system. Though we are handling properly in transfer rules. We can monitor these issues in T-code -> RSMO and PSA (failed records) and update.
If we are talking about whole extraction process, there might be issues of work process scheduling and IDoc transfer to target system from source system. These issues can be re-initiated by canceling that specific data load and ( usually by changing Request color from Yellow - > Red in RSMO). and restart the extraction.
2. Explain briefly about 0record modes in ODS?
ORECORDMODE is SAP Delivered object and will be added to ODS object while activating. Using this ODS will be updated during DELTA loads.. This has three possible values ( X D R).. D & R is for deleting and removing records and X is for skipping records during delta load.
3. What is reconciliation in bw? What the procedure to do reconciliation?
Reconcilation is the process of comparing the data after it is transferred to the BW system with the source system. The procedure to do reconcilation is either you can check the data from the SE16 if the data is coming from a particular table only or if the datasource is any std datasource then the data is coming from the many tables in that scenario what I used to do ask the R/3 consultant to report on that particular selections and used to get the data in the excel sheet and then used to reconcile with the data in BW . If you are familiar with the reports of R/3 then you are good to go meaning you need not be dependant on the R/3 consultant ( its better to know which reports to run to check the data ).
4. What is the daily task we do in production support.How many times we will extract the data at what times.
It depends... Data load timings are in the range of 30 mins to 8 hrs. This time is depends in number of records and kind of transfer rules you have provided. If transfer rules have some kind of round about transfer rules and updates rules has calculations for customized key figures... long times are expected..
Usually You need to work on RSMO and see what records are failing.. and update from PSA.
5. What are some of the frequent failures and errors?
As the frequent failures and errors , there is no fixed reason for the load to be fail , if you want it for the interview perspective I would answer it in this way.
a) Loads can be failed due to the invalid characters
b) Can be because of the deadlock in the system
c) Can be becuase of previuos load failure , if the load is dependant on other loads
d) Can be because of erreneous records
e) Can be because of RFC connections
These are some of the reasons for the load failures.
suresh