BI Workload Stats in Netweaver 7.0

Recently installed or upgraded to BI 7.0? You will find that when using transaction ST03N to view BI Workload statistics (for OLAP,data load stats etc) that it's empty.
This is because ST03N does not read directly from the RSDDSTAT tables anymore.
Using the delivered technical content you need to load the data from RSDDSTAT into technical infoproviders which is then read by ST03N.

See SAP Note 964418 and 934848 for more information on this new feature.

Setting Up BEx Web in BI 7.0

Did you recently upgrade to or install BI 7.0 and want to make use of the new functionalities of BI and Java?
Look at Note 917950 - SAP NetWeaver 2004s: Setting Up BEx Web.
It contains a few attachments which is very handy in setting this up.

Windows 2003 Server Service Pack 2 certified by SAP

Check out SAP Note 30478 - Windows Service Packs.
SAP now supports Windows 2003 Server SP2.

Here's 10 reasons why Microsoft wants you to install SP2.

SAP J2EE server node hanging on startup

Have you ever had that dreadfull experience of a SAP J2EE not wanting to start?

A few days ago I restarted a Netweaver Portal (7.0) server and it's J2EE server nodes "hanged" on status STARTING APPS.
I created a dump stack trace of one of the server nodes, searched some OSS notes and realized it was the Application Thread's that was not enough.I increased the MaxThreadCount parameter of the ApplicationThreadManager as per Note 950921 (using the Configtool) to 100 and restarted the Portal server again, it then started up OK. SAP recommends that for XI system this parameter should at least be 150.
Here's a screenshot of the affected parameter in the Configtool:




The reason for this problem could be additional applications being deployed to the J2EE which uses more application threads or changes to the behaviour of deployed apps so always be sure to check this parameter value from time to time.

You can uses the thread dump viewer supplied by SAP Note 10202246 to make reading the dumps you create in the J2EE easier to read. Here's a screenshot of the viewer :


The following SAP Notes provide good starting points for J2EE troubleshooting:
Note 764417 - Information for troubleshooting of the SAP J2EE Engine 6.40
Note 710154 - How to create a thread dump for the J2EE Engine 6.40