Symptoms

STAD jobs of ABAP agent pile up on a system.

Screenshot #1

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Reason and prerequisites

This behavior is a side effect of WebGUI enablement - STAD collector traces all BSP* transactions from STAD, it automatically creates RFC calls to another application servers and it's too slow. In some cases, it may take a few minutes.

Workaround

To avoid this situation, match rules exclusion should be set. 

1. Exclusion of BSP* sessions from GUI transaction (via a custom exclusion match rule).
2. Exclusion of Generic HTTP match rules so the auto-detection can work correctly.   

Screenshot #2

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Related to this - https://docs.appdynamics.com/display/SAP/Monitor+SAP+Dialog+Transactions

It is not necessary to restart STAD jobs. Once the long-running jobs ended, new jobs were started automatically. After the customizing is adjusted as described previously, the newly started jobs run much faster.

Q&A:

Q: GUI transactions monitoring was disabled - how to monitor a GUI transaction without these permissions?

A: You can manually create custom ‘GUI transaction’ exclusion match rules to exclude certain transactions that create these RFC calls and then activate the ‘GUI transaction’ match rules that you deactivated to stop the STAD collector. 

If the exclusion is set up correctly, the STAD collector will not pick up transactions that make RFC calls where authorizations are missing and the runtime errors will not appear anymore.

Because of this, that transaction will be completely excluded from the monitoring, so to have it monitored correctly, you will have to add the missing authorization.

STAD collector recreates STAD records into BTs based on ‘GUI transaction’ match rules. For each STAD record, it also tries to reconstruct outgoing HTTP and RFC calls. For RFC calls, it tries to call function module FUNCTION_EXISTS using RFC destination stored in the STAD record. In that case, this step fails because the user behind that specific RFC destination does not have sufficient authorizations.

For the next release, we have prepared extended checks that will ‘silence’ RFC call reconstruction for 1 hour if it fails like this. So, instead of creating runtime errors each minute, it will appear only once an hour per RFC destination with insufficient authorizations. For future releases, we plan to add a permanent RFC destination blacklist to completely ignore certain calls.

In the next release, the GUI transaction exclusion rule will not be necessary anymore. 

Related to ABAP agent 4.5.1904.0