We’re trying to figure out how many users are connecting actively so we can get the right level of concurrent users to switch from our old grandfathered single-processor license over to concurrent user licensing.
I’ve already set up a very useful watch list that is monitoring the number of concurrent connections, but we’re finding that users open reports (which establishes a connection) and don’t close them in a timely manner. Some just leave them open because they might need to reference them later, but this causes our count of concurrent connections to be higher that it really needs to be.
I’d like to be able to look at the list of users who represent those active connections rather than just the count that my watch list provides. Is there a way to do this by querying the database or something? Maybe even just an option I can go to in the CMC to look at who the active connects are?
In the BI Administrator’s Cockpit, there is a tile that shows the number of Active users and the number of Active sessions.
You can also see current logged on information by going to the CMC → Settings → View Global System Metrics.
A better option might be to query your audit database. You can get a list of how many distinct users logged in over a given period of time using your audit data.
Ha! Thanks, that’s exactly what I needed to see, but sadly, since we’re not yet moved off the old license model, all our users view reports with one generic login, so the list of connected users just shows me that login with the count of sessions.
You may have to configure separate logins for your users to get that information then. Probably a lot of work but I would anticipate that you would need to do that anyway to convert your licensing.
With your current CPU based licensing, you can create as many users as you want or need so there should be a licensing issue to prevent you from doing that.
When planning, don’t discount the users that aren’t “actively” using the system and are just leaving reports open. If you switch licenses, those users are still going to count as an open/concurrent connection.
@dtolley, yes, that’s exactly why I’ve been doing this research. We need to account for some activity where they’re leaving the reports open (some of our billers leave invoices open for hours while they do verification and reference back to the invoice), but we want to be able to watch for people who have them sitting open simply because they left it open and then forgot. We don’t want to pay for extra licenses because of that. I’ll be looking into ways to hopefully query audit data and look for connections that have been open for some time and either automatically kill them (anyone know if you can just set a timeout on these connections?) or notify those users to close their reports.
Nothing like that. Our accounting software (BST) uses Business Objects for its reporting. So our BOE installation is really just a part of their larger accounting software installation. Our licensing of SAP software is actually embedded in our licensing with BST.
Normally, we don’t pay any attention to the BOE side of this as it’s just the “under the hood” of how our accounting system lets us run invoices and such. We know that when we view an invoice in that software, it’s actually BOE that’s rendering it, but that’s never really required us to need to learn much about BOE beyond what’s in the installation instructions we have from BST. But recently, we’re needing to know a bit more about that side of it as we convert over from our old single processor license to concurrent licensing.
This is all tied into report processing performance issues we’re having with the accounting software and thus suddenly I’m learning more about CMC and all that. BST itself doesn’t have any direct UI type control over connection timeouts and such for BOE, thus if I’m going to set that up, I’d have to set it myself on the CMC side and just let BST choke on it if it thinks it still has a report open and BOE has disconnected that session. The user can always close that report and go back into the viewer again.
So if you know where I should look in CMC to see if there’s a timeout set by default or possibly where to modify that, I’d be forever grateful.
With a generic login, try using the Audit Universe & bring in the IP address.
Counting those should give you a general idea.
Also you can see if any of the IPs are from an unusual place, to add to security.
Default timeout is 20 minutes. Timeout settings in BOE are a PITA! There isn’t just one place to go look. Here’s a link to a SAP Community post (no login required) that will give you some things to check:
