Niping network diagnosis SAP Note 500235

 Niping network diagnosis SAP Note 500235

Basis consultant often feels stuck in a situation when it come to performance issues where user or factory located far away from the central server of the SAP, for instance:-

SAP ECC EHP7 server located in New Zealand DC ( Server) 

While user is located in New York Office ( User) 

A factory located in France. (Factory) 

Basic consultant often blinded by the fact that to look at connectivity and QOS (SAP Network dedicated throughout the corporate network which sometimes termed as quality of service)

Now when P1 raised by the user saying SAP is slow for them, the first thing support will look at are system performance, dev_traces files for any hints, abap dump if its ever generated by users and etc . BUT never the thought comes most of the times to look at network quality. 

This is the reason why SAP introduced their own version of ping test which is called NIPING. while niping test is often associated when user connects to the central system through SAProuter. 

NIPING is similar to PING and the whole idea is to check if there's any latency in comparison for the particular user connecting to SAP server located remotely.

There are few ways in utilizing NIPING as below

1. Measuring RTT

niping -c -H <nipingsvr> -B 1 -L 100
(The buffersize of 1 may cause an error in other version of niping. If yes please use  niping -c -H <nipingsvr> -B 20 -L 100  )

Some examples in using Niping

2. Long LAN stability test:

niping -c -H <nipingsvr> -B 10000 -D 100 -L 360000

The uses 100000 bytes per second of bandwidth (about 10% of a 10 mbps Ethernet) and will last 10 hours as how the parameter works.

3. Long WAN test (idle timeouts):

niping -c -H <nipingsvr> -P -D 3600000

Every hour, this test starts a TCP connection and delivers a test packet (delay of 3600000ms). It lasts for ten hours. The purpose is to see if a "idle timeout" interrupts the TCP connection. 

4. Short throughput/stability test:

niping -c -H <nipingsvr> -B 1000000 -L 100

Connection is tested with 100 MB of data as quickly as possible. This should take roughly 10 seconds on a 100 Mbps Ethernet connection.