Working with Administration Tools

You can provision multiple instances of SAP HANA Cloud. SAP HANA Cloud Central is a tool to provision and manage all your SAP HANA Cloud instances on one screen.

Watch this video to learn about SAP HANA Cloud Central.

A key tool used by the administrator of SAP HANA Cloud is the SAP HANA Cockpit.

The SAP HANA cockpit provides a single point of access to a range of tools for the administration and detailed monitoring of your SAP HANA cloud database. The tool presents key information about the database using configurable cards. Each card provides only the essential information, but a drill-down is possible from each card to get to the detailed information. The cards are grouped into views. SAP provide four standard views but administrators can created additional views. A custom view can include only the cards they are interested in and also the settings and filters that apply to them

The key areas of SAP HANA Cloud that can be managed and monitored using the SAP HANA Cockpit include:

• Services - database services such as indexserver, nameserver.
• Memory - monitor memory usage and check out-of-memory issues
• Alerts - be warned of critical situation such as disk becoming full
• Workload - organise jobs into workloads for better system utilization
• Table Usage - ensure tables are optimally designed for best performance
• Database Configuration - manage configuration (*.ini) files that determine database behavior

You access the SAP HANA cockpit for your SAP HANA instance through SAP HANA Cloud Central, SAP BTP Cockpit, or by using the direct URL.

The cloud version of SAP HANA Cockpit is based on the same design as the SAP HANA Cockpit used in SAP HANA on-premise deployments.

The SAP HANA Cockpit has its own release cycle separate from SAP HANA Cloud. New features are immediately pushed out to all customers. There is no upgrade to perform, this is done by the cloud provider.

Note

Be careful not to confuse SAP HANA Cockpit with SAP BTP Cockpit. The latter is used to manage all SAP cloud applications which includes SAP HANA Cloud, but there are many others too. SAP HANA Cockpit is used to manage only SAP HANA Cloud databases.

Cockpits provide a user-friendly interface for carrying out key administration tasks. However, there are also two command line interfaces available that are used with SAP HANA Cloud setup and administration.

Command Line Interfaces are often preferred by administrators who want to create scripts to automate tasks, or to copy/paste commands that are regularly used.

The BTP Command Line Interface (btp CLI)

Cockpits provide a user-friendly interface for carrying out key tasks. However, there are also two command line interfaces available that are used with SAP HANA Cloud setup and administration.

The SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) Command Line Interface (CLI) is an alternative to the BTP cockpit for users who prefer working with a command line. This interface is usually referred to simply as btp CLI.

These are some of the tasks that you perform with the btp CLI.

• Creating subaccounts and directories
• Managing entitlements of global accounts and subaccounts
• Managing users and their authorizations in global accounts and subaccounts
• Subscribing to applications

You can try out the btp CLI using a trial account.

Cloud Foundry Command Line Interface (cf CLI)

Use the Cloud Foundry Command Line Interface (cf CLI) for managing subaccounts in the Cloud Foundry environment, such as creating orgs and spaces, or managing quota

These are some of the tasks that you perform with the cf CLI.

• Create spaces
• Add ORGANIZATION members
• Add SPACE members
• Create SPACE quota plans
• Assign quota plans to SPACES

The SAP HANA Database Explorer is used to query information about the database and display information about your database's catalog objects of SAP HANA database.

A key feature of the SAP HANA Database Explorer is the in-built SQL console. Use this to write SQL and SQLScript statements. It includes code correction and auto-complete capabilities. You can execute the SQL statements view the results and examine the SQL plan and run-time statistics to identify issues.

Search tools can be used to locate database objects.

The Database Explorer can be used with both HDI containers and classic schemas.

You access the SAP HANA Database Explorer from the SAP HANA Cockpit or from the Business Application Studio.

Containers play a key role in SAP HANA Cloud database development and provide an efficient method of isolating the database runtime artifacts and encouraging modularization. User and roles are granted privileges on containers so that they can access the resources they contain.

An SAP HANA Cloud database will usually have many containers. Each container will have various combinations of user and role privileges assigned. This can soon become difficult to manage.

The HANA Deployment Infrastructure (HDI) Administration tool allows an administrator to easily navigate containers, adding them into groups and displaying the users and roles that have been granted access to them. The administrator can grant and revoke container privileges to users or roles. The tool is accessed from the SAP HANA Cloud Cockpit and is located under Database Administration > HDI Administration.