Spool Administration

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 devices 

2. Provides a uniform interface for different host spool systems 

3. Supports local, remote, and PC printing 

4. Supports multiple print and output devices, formats, paper types, and

character sets 

5. Better look of spool administration transactions 

6. Multiple spool work processes per instance 

7. Open interface to external output management system (OMS) 

8. Spool accounting exit 

9. Workload balancing 

SAP Printing System Administration Tasks 

The 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: 

o Periodically checking and monitoring the spool system, both at SAP

and at the operating system level.

o Deleting old spool requests or scheduling the background job which

automatically deletes them.

o Defining new printers, device types, and other device elements.

o Using the statistical information of the system for fine−tuning the

planning strategy.

o Troubleshooting the spool system

Managing Spool Request 

o There are several ways of calling the spool request management

functions:

o From the main menu, select Tools CCMS Spool Output management

o From any menu, select System Services Output controller

o Directly enter transaction code SP01 in the command field

o

o 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 date−but these parameters can all be overwritten.

o Once the selection criteria is entered, just press the Enter key 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 flag Delete after print are 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

o

o Spool no. It's the spool request number as it has been automatically

assigned by the system.

o

o 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

o

o User name push button on the application toolbar.

o Time. Time when the spool request was generated.

o

o 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.

o

o Wait: The output request is waiting to be processed by the spool

system. It has not yet been sent to the host spool system.

o

o Process: The spool work process is formatting the spool request to be

sent to the printer.

o

o Print: The host system spool is processing (printing) the SAP output

request.

o

o Compl: The output request has been completed and successfully

printed.

o

o <F5>: This status indicates that there is more than one output request

for the same spool

o 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 request push button on the application

toolbar.

o

o 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.

o

o Error: There is a severe printing error. No output request is generated

at the physical printer.

o

o 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.

o

o Pages. Indicates the number of pages of the output request.

o

o 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): 

What 

The spool is the R/3 System’s output manager. Data is first sent to the R/3

spool and then to the operating system for printing 

Why 

You 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 System 

1. In the Command field, enter transaction SP01 and choose Enter 

2. Delete information in Created by. 

3. Set the Date created field 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 in Client.

5. Choose .    

6. Look for jobs with an error in the Output Status column. 

7. Double click on the Error. 

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 was 

Unable to establish connection to the Berkley LPD). 

Check total no. of Spool Request (Transaction SPAD): 

Login to the SAP System 

1.In the Command field, enter transaction SPAD and choose Enter 

2. Click on Admin 

3Click on Print Request Overview 

This 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 the 

operating system’s print spooler or manager. You need to check that old

spool jobs are being 

properly cleared by the daily batch job 

Why: 

1. Depending on how the spool system has been configured, old spools will

use database 

space 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 the Command field, enter transaction SP01 and choose Enter 

2. Enter *CMM* or *JMM* or *SRM_SERVICE* in the Created by fields: 

Date created (date) 

3. Enter date into To date field 

4 .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 the Process

overview transaction 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 SP01 System

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 status Complete or problem and 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 old spool requests ? How to avoid spool overflow issue ? How to check spool numbers? How to set the spool number in 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 limited storage capacity of 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 system

How 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 requests

and 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 days equal 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 number   in 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 in SCC4 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 can set a parameterrspo/store_location in 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 ?