Change analysis is part of end-to-end analysis within root cause analysis. Change analysis is based on the data of the configuration and change database (CCDB) within SAP Solution Manager. Any change figures are stored in SAP NetWeaver BW, and the configuration data itself is stored in the configuration stores of the CCDB. The configuration stores are part of the CCDB and contain all configuration details. Change Analysis application is available in End-to-End Analysis.

The change analysis function provides an overview of the changes that have been applied to the managed systems. It also displays the number of changes per system, change category, and day. You can access it from the Root Cause Analysis Group. It reports changes of configuration items of a system (for example, OS, DB, ABAP parameters, Java parameters, transport requests, and Support Packages) and serves as a central entry point for root cause analysis.
Change analysis helps you to keep track of the changes in your solution landscape. Your development system might behave differently than your production system. Or, J2EE instances of your productive system behave differently and you need to find out the reason. Therefore, regular snapshots of the configuration settings are taken and stored in the configuration and change database (CCDB) of SAP Solution Manager. With this information, the change analysis function enables you to identify the changes. The change analysis function provides the number of changes details and history of a changed item.

Changes are a common starting point for problems in your landscape. Imagine that something worked yesterday, but it is not working anymore today. The first question would be what changed in between?

E2E Change Analysis is the tool to analyze problems like this. Again, the tool starts with an overview on the overall changes which have been applied to the landscape (see the below Figure). You can use the timeframe mechanism, to limit the timeframe to the point when the problem occurred first.

Figure: Change Analysis

From here, the SAPUI5 based Change Analysis application allows you again to drill down to the type of changes and from there to the actual changes itself. The available changes are categorized (again depending on the system type) and then displayed like in the lower part (example for an ABAP system). Here you can easily identify that on certain dates a lot of changes in the definition of RFC destinations or that on another day Gateway relevant parameter changes have been applied to the system.

With a further drill down, it's then possible to identify the changes in detail and also get a history on the single change.

In addition to the time-based analysis, it is possible to compare the configuration of two systems against another one using the Change Reporting tool. By this it is possible for example if you have a problem in your production system which cannot be reproduced in the quality assurance system, what the configuration differences between the two systems are.

The Configuration Validation tool uses the data of the CCDB to allow compliance reporting by comparing several systems together. With Configuration Validation you can answer the following questions, for example:

• Have all transports from the development system arrived in the production system?
• How long did a transport take to get from the development system to the production system after it was released?
• Have particular notes been imported into the production system?