Spool Administration (SP01)

The Need for Spool Administration:

The SAP system has a printing architecture that needs close administration and monitoring. It is organized in such a way that when users send a print job in the system, the spool work process prepares data in the spool request and generates output requests that contains the formatting details of the printer. Long running active print jobs is probably an indication of spool problems and needs to be investigated. You need to check that old spools are deleted from the SAP system. Transaction SP01 provides an environment to get a clue of the cause of a printing or spool problem.Basic features of the SAP spool system are the following:1. Manages the output requests for printing, for the SAP communication server, and for the archiving devices2. Provides a uniform interface for different host spool systems3. Supports local, remote, and PC printing4. Supports multiple print and output devices, formats, paper types, and character sets5. Better look of spool administration transactions6. Multiple spool work processes per instance7. Open interface to external output management system (OMS)8. Spool accounting exit9. Workload balancing

SAP Printing System Administration TasksThe SAP printing system and associated tasks are a subset of those general administration tasks for the daily operation of the SAP system.R/3 system managers should be in charge of the following tasks: Periodically checking and monitoring the spool system, both at SAP and at the operating system level. Deleting old spool requests or scheduling the background job which automatically deletes them. Defining new printers, device types, and other device elements. Using the statistical information of the system for finetuning the planning strategy. Troubleshooting the spool systemManaging Spool Request There are several ways of calling the spool request management functions: From the main menu, selectTools CCMS Spool Output management From any menu, selectSystem Services Output controller Directly enter transaction code SP01 in the command field This initial output controller display behaves like a selection screen, where you can search spool requests by spool request number, spool request name, user name, date, client, and so forth. By default, the screen always presents the logon user name, the logon client, and the system current datebut these parameters can all be overwritten. Once the selection criteria is entered, just press theEnterkey or click on theOverview (Continue)icon on the standard toolbar to display a list of spool requests matching the criteria. The spool requests which have been successfully printed and for which the user had selected the flagDelete after printare automatically deleted from the system, and therefore will not appear on this list. On this screen, the system displays information about the spool requests arranged by columns. These columns are Spool no.It's the spool request number as it has been automatically assigned by the system. Generation date.Date in which the spool request was generated. This column can be toggled with the client and user name information by clicking on the User namepush button on the application toolbar. Time.Time when the spool request was generated. Output status.Indicates what the status is of the spool request. The system can display the following output statuses For this spool request no output request (order to print) has been generated. Wait:The output request is waiting to be processed by the spool system. It has not yet been sent to the host spool system. Process:The spool work process is formatting the spool request to be sent to the printer. Print:The host system spool is processing (printing) the SAP output request. Compl:The output request has been completed and successfully printed. :This status indicates that there is more than one output request for the same spool Request. You can double click on this status field to show all the associated output requests or, alternatively, select the check box to the left and click on theOutput requestpush button on the application toolbar. Problem:A problem has occurred during the output request processing. The printing might have been generated; however, it might not be correct or correspond actually to the expected printed format. Error:There is a severe printing error. No output request is generated at the physical printer. Archive:For spool requests that were sent to an archiving device. The spool request has been processed by the spool system and is waiting for archiving. Pages.Indicates the number of pages of the output request. Title.Displays the title of the spool request if the user entered one when submitting a spool request, otherwise the system by default shows as the title the type of request, the device name, the program, and the first three characters of the user name.

Check the spool for printing problems (Transaction SP01):WhatThe spool is the R/3 Systems output manager. Data is first sent to the R/3 spool and then to the operating system for printingWhyYou should check for active spool jobs that have been running for over an hour. These long running jobs could indicate a problem with the operating system spool or the printer.Login to the SAP System1. In theCommandfield, enter transactionSP01and chooseEnter2. Delete information inCreated by.3. Set theDate createdfield to, for example a week ago, or to any other date range to check for other problems.The range of data There may be problems with the printer at the operating system level. These problems need to be resolved immediately for time-critical print jobs (for example, checks, invoices, Shipping documents, etc.) Or there may be an operational impact.will depend on your installation. If you generate hundreds or thousands of spools a day, you would choose every day. This data range would be much shorter, possibly only two days.4. Delete information inClient.

5. Choose .6. Look for jobs with an error in theOutput Statuscolumn.

7. Double click on theError.

8. Select the error.9. Choose.10. Review the error.

11. From this point, troubleshooting depends on the specific problem.12. Choose.13. Select the error.

14. Choose.

15. Use the log to investigate the problem (for example, this job wasUnable to establish connection to the Berkley LPD).Check total no. of Spool Request (Transaction SPAD):Login to the SAP System1.In theCommandfield, enter transactionSPADand chooseEnter

2. Click onAdmin

3Click on Print Request OverviewThis will show you the Total spool request count. If the count is goes beyond 150000 then delete the old spool request by transaction SP01

.Checking that Old spools are deleted (SP01):What :The SAP spool is the output manager for R/3. From the SAP spool, the print job goes to theoperating systems print spooler or manager. You need to check that old spool jobs are beingproperly cleared by the daily batch jobWhy:1. Depending on how the spool system has been configured, old spools will use databasespace or file system space.Whether it is database or file system space, potentially available space is being used by these spools.2. Look for any errors that may indicate problems in the printing process.

1. In theCommandfield, enter transactionSP01and chooseEnter

2. Enter *CMM* or *JMM* or *SRM_SERVICE* in theCreated byfields:Date created(date)3. Enter date into To date field4 .Choose

Go to Edit click on Select All

Go to Spool Request click on Delete

Click on Yes

Troubleshooting Printing Problems

The following is a list of possible steps to perform when you notice printing problems in the system. These problems can be very different: no printing at all, slow printing, printing garbage, and so forth.In any case, you should Check and monitor the spool work process from theProcess overviewtransaction as well as from the operating system spool (print daemon or print manager). Also, check that the message server is working properly. Particularly, check that you can print normally from your operating system.Find which printer is causing the problems. Use transaction SP01System Services Output controller.

Check the output request attributes, the log files, and the size of the print job For remote printers, check the network connection. If a print job has been printed out but contains unreadable characters, check whether the device type is the most appropriate, whether the printer is working in emulation mode, and what the access method is for the device. When nothing is output at the printer and the output controller is in wait status, check the system developer traces and the system log and look for timeout messages. Check that all application servers running spool work processes are reachable.If the job has statusCompleteorproblemand nothing is output at the physical printer, it might be related to a wrong output device definition, a problem in the host spooler, the physical printer, or the SAPLPD transfer program. Carefully check the access method. If printing is very slow, possible causes might be lost indexes in the spool tables, too many spool table entries, slow WAN connections, or incorrectly defined access methods. Often you will need to review the printing strategy about distribution of output devices in several application servers according to their expected volume and size of print jobs. Refer to the SAP online documentation and the SAP net about some interesting planning strategies for the spool system.

what is spool overflow ? How to troubleshoot spool overflow issue ?This article answers the following queries :

What is spool overflow ? How to troubleshoot spool overflow ? How to delete oldspool requests ? How to avoid spool overflow issue ? How to check spool numbers? How to set the spool numberin SAP ? How to define storage location (Temse) of spool requests ?

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What is spool overflow ? :

Spool request that got generated are stored in a temporary sequential file called Temse. Please note that these are stored in Temse because these are not stored permanently. The size of the Temse is limited by the parameter definition.The default size of Temse is 32,000 and it can be increased till 2 billion. However, defining very high value can effect the database performance. Due to limitedstorage capacityof Temse, when this file got full,this throws an SAP spool overflow error.

If this happens, customers could not print from SAP. If you check in SM21 and ST22 transactions, you may encounter some error log or dumps like

ERROR IN SPOOL call : SPOOL OVERFLOW SPOOL_INTERNAL_ERROR System internal error in the spool systemHow to troubleshoot spool overflow ?

To resolve this spool issue, some of the old spools can be deleted from the sap system. Goto transaction SPAD. From the initial screen, navigate to Administration -> Clean_up_spool. Once you click this, Spool Administration : Delete old spool requests screen will be displayed.In that screen, you will be prompted to choose requests for deletion like

Old spool requests older than the maximum set age Requests already printed All spool requestsand enter value for minimum age (in days) text box.

Select the check boxes as per the requirement (eg: delete all requests already printed and minimum age in daysequal to 30 days)and execute to delete old spool requests, which will clear Temse and will resolve spool over flow issue.

Apart from this there are others ways of resolving spool overflow issue. They are

1) Run the report RSPO0041 from SE38 transaction to delete old spool requests

2) Run the report RSPO0043 from SE38 transaction, which checks the Temse/spool consistency and reorganizes the spool

How to avoid spool overflow issue ?

These reports RSPO0041 and RSPO0043 should be scheduled as background jobs with proper variants on a periodic basis which avoids spool overflow issue.

You can try to increase the spool numbers from default 32000 to a bit higher value but please note donot set this too high as it may impact database performance

Proactive monitoring check can be made in RZ20 transaction to see how much is the fill level of spool numbers.How to check spool numbers ?

To check spool numbers: Goto RZ20 transaction, navigate to SAP CCMS Monitor Templates -> Spool System.

Here you can check the status of spool servers and the used numbers percentage of spool numbers. If you find that used numbers is greater than 80%, you can manually run above mentioned reports or delete old spool requests from SPAD tcode as mentioned earlier.

How to set the spool numberin SAP ?

Using Transaction SNRO (Number range object maintenance) and object SPO_NUM, you can set the spool number in an SAP system.

Once you provide object as SPO_NUM, click on change icon. It displays another screen. In that screen, click on Number Ranges push button. It displays another screen "Number range for spooler numbers". Click on change icon here and set the value of spooler(from number and to number). Please note that a change request may be generated here based on the client settings(if automatic recording of changes is set inSCC4 transaction of the client)

How to define storage location (Temse) of spool requests ?

Every Temse object contains a header in TST01 table and the actual object. This can be either stored in table TST03 or in file system. You canseta parameterrspo/store_locationin RZ10 to define whether to store Temse objects TST03 table or in filesystem.

If value G is set to this parameter, it will be stored in filesystem and if it is db it is stored in TST03 table.

How to change a SAP parameter ?