Working with Performance Traces

If you were facing performance issues in SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain Excel UI and you implemented the recommendations that you had found from SAP documentation (and as listed in this chapter) and are still facing performance issues in Microsoft Excel or other Microsoft Excel issues such as the system crashing, you can consider opening an incident with SAP Product Support.

For performance incidents, system administrators should be considering attaching the log file to the incident. The most relevant file to be collected and provided is the one called: "PerfTrace_nnnn.glf" in the Client Log: C:\Users\＜your user＞\AppData\Local\Temp\log.

Before sending the file, administrators may want to increase the log level to provide more information to support.

Open Windows Explorer and navigate to the install location of the SAP Integrated Business Planning, add-in for Microsoft Excel. Make sure that Microsoft Excel is closed.

Default locations are:

• C:\Program Files (x86)\SAP\IBP Excel Add-In
• OR
• C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Programs\SAP\IBP Excel Add-In

Search for IBPXLClient.dll-ExcelLogConfig.xml.

Edit the file with a plain-text editor (such as Microsoft Notepad or Notepad++) by running as administrator and scroll to the bottom of the file. It looks like this:

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＜logger name="Log"＞
＜level value="ERROR"/＞
＜appender-ref ref="DefaultLogFileAppender"/＞
＜/logger＞
＜logger name="Trace"＞
＜level value="ERROR"/＞
＜appender-ref ref="DefaultTraceFileAppender"/＞
＜/logger＞
＜logger name="Trace.Performance" additivity="false"＞
＜level value="ERROR"/＞
＜appender-ref ref="PerfTraceFileAppender"/＞
＜/logger＞
＜/log4net＞
＜/configuration＞
Change the level value from ERROR to ALL for all three logs ("Log", "Trace" & "Trace.Performance"):
＜logger name="Log"＞
＜level value="ALL"/＞
＜appender-ref ref="DefaultLogFileAppender"/＞
＜/logger＞
＜logger name="Trace"＞
＜level value="ALL"/＞
＜appender-ref ref="DefaultTraceFileAppender"/＞
＜/logger＞
＜logger name="Trace.Performance" additivity="false"＞
＜level value="ALL" /＞
＜appender-ref ref="PerfTraceFileAppender"/＞
＜/logger＞
＜logger name="Recorder"＞
＜level value="ALL"/＞
＜/logger＞
＜/log4net＞
＜/configuration＞

Once the log level is increased, you should open Microsoft Excel and reproduce the issue in the Microsoft Excel Add-In.

Next, you should close Microsoft Excel and collect the log files (search for the most recent files) from %tmp%/log (copy and paste this into your windows explorer).

Business users can also change the log level in the Log dialog, as well as work with the logs. When you change the log level here, the change is valid for your actual Microsoft Excel instance. The log configuration file doesn't get changed, and the log level is automatically reset to the value last used in the log configuration file, once you close Microsoft Excel.

You can also locate log files in the SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain Microsoft Excel UI via the add-in. The path is About → Help → Log.

In the dialog that opens, you can see the following information:

• The recent lines of the log.

  If you need to provide the log information to your administrator, or to SAP support, you can copy and paste the text directly out of the dialog.

• Technical information about your installed software and environment.

  SAP IBP, add-in for Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Office, operating system, and other properties and settings.

• The location of the log files on the computer.

  By choosing the Open Folder button, you can access the log files directly. You can also copy the file path to your clipboard.

At the bottom of the form, you can see the settings for log types and log levels. You can use the different log types in the SAP IBP, add-in for Microsoft Excel (Microsoft Excel add-in) to achieve different goals. Using the different log levels, you can control what level of information is being logged.

For example, when gathering performance traces, the log level should be set to All.