Explaining the Concept of Monitoring Tools in SAP Solution Manager

The Monitoring and Alerting Infrastructure (MAI) was introduced in SAP Solution Manager 7.1 to be SAP’s standard for centralized monitoring applications. The MAI allows stable, reliable operation of complex heterogeneous system landscapes.

SAP Solution Manager can display additional data that does not originate in CCMS, which means it also has the following additional features:

• Additional ways of collecting data
• Additional modes of data transfer between place of origin and data storage in SAP Solution Manager
• Additional tools for displaying and analyzing the collected information

This section lists several monitoring and analysis capabilities of SAP Solution Manager and their technical prerequisites.

SAP Solution Manager enables you to monitor many different metrics of SAP and non-SAP systems within your system landscape.

To monitor the greatest possible number of metrics and use the full scope of monitoring capabilities in SAP Solution Manager, it is necessary to configure SAP Solution Manager and the remote system accordingly (as illustrated in the figure).

Remote systems are also called managed systems or satellite systems. SAP Solution Manager is also called the managing system.

The overview in the figure is highly simplified and depicts the data flow and potential applications.

To fully use the features of Monitoring and Alerting Infrastructure (MAI) in SAP Solution Manager, the following technical components must be installed:

CA™ Introscope Adapter (or IS Adapter)

These agents collect performance data and metrics from various components. They exist in different versions. The CA™ Introscope Bytecode Agent, for example, collects performance data and metrics from a Java server process. The collected data is then forwarded, for example, to CA™ APM Introscope Enterprise Manager.

CA™ APM Introscope Enterprise Manager (EM)

The EM serves as a central storage system, where all data collected by CA™ Introscope Agents (IS agents) is stored centrally. To enable display all the metrics of the Monitoring and Alerting Infrastructure (MAI) in SAP Solution Manager, they are also passed on to SAP Solution Manager.

SAP Solution Manager Diagnostics Agent (formerly SMD Agent)

The SAP Solution ManagerDiagnostics Agent enables you to create a connection between SAP Solution Manager and the managed system and to collect information from the remote system. It must be installed once on each host or virtual host.

SAP Host Agent

The SAP Host Agent is the component that monitors the interaction between the host system and the operating system. It must be installed once on each physical host that you want to monitored.

Hint

We recommend that you install the diagnostics agents and SAP Host Agent on non-SAP systems as well, to collect operating system metrics, for example. A diagnostics agent and SAP Host Agent must also be running on the host where the CA™ APM Introscope components are installed.

Extractor Framework (EFWK)

The Extractor Framework (EFWK) processes the information from the connected ABAP systems and from the CA™ APM Introscope Enterprise Manager within SAP Solution Manager. To do so, the EFWK saves the data in a product instance perspective within an InfoCube. An InfoCube is a technical component and part of SAP Business Information Warehouse.

ST-PI and ST-A/PI

An interface for the collection and transmission of data and performance metrics of ABAP components (technically, ST-PI and ST-A/PI are two SAP software components). The Extractor Framework (EFWK) calls the remote functions within the satellite systems and stores this information within the SAP Solution Manager system.

For more information, see https://support.sap.com/en/alm/solution-manager.html. In particular, note these two topic areas for this scenario on this page:

• Application Operations
• Setup & Configuration (which can be found under cross topics)

In particular, also read the following SAP Notes:

• 1365123 – Installation of Diagnostics Agents and the attached document, AgentInstallationStrategy.pdf.
• 797147 – Introscope Installation for SAP Customers.

For more information about configuring SAP Solution Manager and the infrastructure it used, see the SAP course SM100.

The following is an overview of all available monitoring functions of the MAI (version: SAP Solution Manager Release 7.2 SPS15):

System Monitoring

The System Monitoring application provides an overview of the current status of technical systems, including their associated instances, databases and hosts.

System Monitoring is based on automated checks in regular time intervals in the four categories Availability, Performance, Exceptions, and Configuration. In each of these categories, several metrics and corresponding thresholds can be defined per managed object.

User Experience Monitoring

User Experience Monitoring (UXMon - formerly EEM) is an efficient toolbox for evaluating and reporting the availability and performance of your productive systems from a client-side perspective. As a result of the perfect integration into the E2E Diagnostics infrastructure, discovering, analysis, and resolution of occurring issues has been speeded up dramatically. Problems can often be solved before employees or customers even take notice about them, thereby yielding a lower TCO.

Interface Monitoring

Provides you with a powerful tool to monitor various interface technologies within your landscape.

All metrics are set up as Interface Channels, which allows you to abstract from a concrete technical implementation of an interface and bring together different interfaces that serve the same business purpose. Inside an Interface Channel the separate interfaces can be defined and metrics can be selected which monitor the interface in various aspects, focusing on error or backlog situations during processing. The Interface Channels can be assigned to ICMon scenarios as well as to Business Process Monitoring scenarios.

Process Integration Monitoring

Provides unified alert notifications, exceptions and status of PI components from a single-entry point. It also provides options to navigate to details of such exceptions in the respective host system. It becomes easier for addressing the issues more quickly and efficiently.

Business Intelligence Monitoring

In Business Intelligence (BI) scenarios it is critical to ensure that end users retrieve up-to-date information from the BI solution. This requires sufficient performance and availability of all involved components. Business Intelligence Monitoring has the capabilities to ensure that the involved technical systems and components are working as expected.

This includes the status overview for all technical components involved in SAP Business Intelligence Solution, the cross-system SAP BW process chains and single process chain steps, the monitoring of SAP BW queries and templates and the BusinessObjects specific jobs and correlation to system specific metrics.

Job Monitoring

Job Monitoring belongs to important central monitoring tasks and can ensure that background jobs and job chains are running as expected. You can monitor the following types of jobs in a distributed system landscape:

• ABAP jobs
• SAP BW process chains
• SAP BusinessObjects (SBOP) jobs
• SAP Data Services (DS) jobs
• SMSE jobs: It allows you to monitor any type of externally scheduled jobs
• Custom jobs: It allows you to monitor any kind of job for which you have APIs that deliver job runtime information ("JobListGet"), that is, you can use the SAP Solution Manager job monitoring configuration and consumption UIs by implementing a couple of enhancements, for example, SAP S/4HANA cloud edition Application Jobs in the context of SAP Integrated Business Planning (SAP IBP).

Message Flow Monitoring

Message Flow Monitoring adds value to the already established Process Integration Monitoring. While PI Monitoring focuses on the technical monitoring of involved PI components, the Message Flow Monitoring provides a way to investigate and trace dedicated flows through the PI landscape on the level of single message instances. Besides company internal message flows, flows between business partners can also be monitored on a high resolution level, using technical and functional acknowledgements.

Once the monitoring scenarios you are going to use are configured you can start the transaction SM_WORKCENTER in the SAP Solution Manager, and navigate to the System and Application Monitoring section.

From here, you can access all monitoring scenarios that you have configured with transaction SOLMAN_SETUP. This includes, following cross-application functions (valid for all monitoring scenarios):

• Alert Inbox: Displays the triggered alerts for all configured scenarios.
• Alert Search: Once an Alert has been confirmed you could find the confirmed Alerts here.
• Alert Reporting: Pre Defined Reports for Alerts to use in a SAP Operations Control Center.

As well as the Monitoring Application itself, for example:

• System Monitoring: Graphical display of the status of selected systems.
• Interface Monitoring: Monitors the interfaces and connections between business-critical systems.
• Message Flow Monitoring: To monitor single message instances

In addition, you find the following tiles:

• SAP EarlyWatch Alert Sessions: SAP EarlyWatch Alert is an automatic diagnostic service that sends data regularly from the monitored system to SAP Solution Manager, which analyzes and evaluates it, to identify possible problems early, avoid bottlenecks and monitor system performance.
• 3 mobile optimized tiles for User Experience Monitoring, Message Flow Monitoring and System Monitoring
• Configuration System and Application Monitoring, to jump to the Guided Procedure for Configuration (like SOLMAN_SETUP transaction)

To explain the cross-application functions we want to introduce the Alert Inbox which is the central access point for analyzing and solving technical monitoring problems in an SAP Solution Manager landscape. As shown in the figure Central Alert Inbox, all alerts from all configured monitoring scenarios are displayed centrally in the Alert Inbox.

The Alert Inbox is divided into two areas by default:

• Aggregated Alerts (upper area): This area lists all alerts that belong to the same type of alert.

  Options include confirming all alerts of a given type and choosing Change Configuration to change the configuration of the alert. The advantage of this approach is that you can see both the current status in the Current column and the worst value in the Worst column.

• Alert Groups (usually the lower area): When you select an aggregated alert, all exceeded thresholds are displayed in the lower area with the date, time, and details of the selected alert.

  You can enter yourself as processor here (Assign) or enter a comment (Add Comment). The Start Date/Time column indicates the first time the alert was reported, while the End Date/Time column shows the last time it was reported.

  You can also use all the available analysis methods to analyze the alert and solve the problem (with the button Show Details you jump to the Alert Details).

• Alert Details

  To display the alert details, you can choose Display Details or, as mentioned above, set the Alert Details field on the upper right to Embedded.

  The Central Alert Inbox figure also displays alert details. The upper buttons (Confirm, Assign, and so on) have the same functions as described above.

  When you click the icon to the right of the header, alert description and analysis, you open the section for the analysis tools that are available for examining the cause of the alert in detail. For example, you could use the E2E Workload Analysis, transaction SM50, or transaction SM04. Of course, you can also add customer analysis tools within the alert configuration.

  The Alert Details section contains all the metrics from which the alert was defined, along with the status of each individual metric. You also have the option of selecting a row to display the details of the metric or clicking the icon in the Type column to open the Metric Viewer. From the Alert Details you are also able to show specific metrics for a longer time period using the Metric Viewer.

You can configure the interval for automatic updates (such as never, every 5 minutes, and so on) in the Automatic Update field. You can also display the alert details within the content area. To do so, use the Alert Details field, which you set to Embedded instead of New Window.

You could also use the following cross-application functions from the SAP Solution Manager Launchpad (not in the slide):

• Alert Search: To search for alerts from different monitoring areas. For example if somebody confirms an alert and you want to know who and why.
• Alert Reporting: View information about the alerts related to Application Operations, grouped by different categories and status.

System Monitoring tile shows the status of the systems, hosts, and databases in the SAP Solution Manager system landscape

There are different sections on the Overview page: System Overview, Host Overview, and Database Overview. There, you can view the total number of systems, hosts, or databases in the landscape. You can also view the status of the systems, hosts, or databases, based on their rating. Systems with grey status are displayed as per user preference. Otherwise, the grey systems are not displayed by default.

In System Monitoring, you can also display the status of the selected systems graphically as shown in the screen shot.

In the System Hierarchy, on the left-hand side of the screen it displays the hierarchy view, which shows the current status of the system, the instance, the database, the database instance, and the operating system. The status of the corresponding alert group is displayed as an icon and in the colors green, yellow, red, and gray. The colors have the following meanings:

• Red: Error
• Yellow: Warning
• Green: Neither error nor warning
• Gray: No data available

The right side of the screen contains the event and metrics view. From here, you can view the individual metrics of all managed objects in the sort sequence of the alert group. The last respective measurement point of each metric is displayed.

When you choose a metric name, this opens the metric details, where you can also display the metric documentation, change the configuration of the metric, or check the data collection.

Choosing the icon before or after the metric name opens the metrics monitor. The metrics monitor displays the selected metric for a longer time period. You can choose a measurement point to display its details. You also have the option of configuring the required period with the slider at the bottom.

Interface and Connection Monitoring tile allows the monitoring of the interfaces and connections between business-critical systems.

You can monitor interfaces in detail, for example, the performance of connections between systems or define interfaces on the level of functions called in a system. These function calls may be, for example, a function module (in the case of an RFC connection) or methods called via a web service.

Further information on the configuration of the Monitoring and Alerting Infrastructure (MAI) and using the System and Application Monitoring functions is taught in SAP course E2E120.