Lesson Overview
In this lesson, you'll learn how to use the alerting framework available in the SAP HANA cockpit provided in the SAP BTP.
You can also change the alert attributes provided in the alerting framework available in the SAP HANA cockpit provided in the SAP BTP.
Business Case
As an administrator, using the alerting framework, you can proactively monitor the status of the SAP HANA Cloud database instance. With the alerting framework, you're alerted to critical situations, for example: a disk is becoming full, CPU usage is reaching a critical level, or a server has stopped.
The internal monitoring infrastructure of the SAP HANA database is continuously collecting and evaluating information about status, performance, and resource usage from all components of the SAP HANA database. In addition, it performs regular checks on the data in system tables and views, and when configurable threshold values are exceeded, it issues alerts. In this way, you're warned of potential problems. The priority of the alert indicates the severity of the problem and depends on the nature of the check and the configured threshold values. For example, if 90% of available disk space has been used, a low-priority alert is issued; if 98% has been used, a high priority alert is issued.
SAP HANA Cockpit – Alerts Card
In the SAP HANA cockpit Database Overview page, search for the Alerts card (1).
The Alerts card (2) shows the current alerts of the SAP HANA Cloud database. Multiple alerts can be shown. Their status can be high or medium depending on the severity of the detected problem.
Selecting the Alerts card opens the Alerts app (3), which gives a detailed breakdown of all the current alerts in your SAP HANA Cloud database.
On the Manage Alerts page, the default summary list includes all current alerts with a priority of high, medium, and error. You can filter, sort, and view details in the search area (1) as needed.
In the Alerts display area (2), you see detailed information on the available alerts. The columns provide the following information.
- Priority: Indicates the severity of the alert and how quickly action needs to be taken. The following priorities are possible:
- Information: Action is recommended to improve system performance or stability.
- Low: Medium-term action is required to mitigate the risk of downtime.
- Medium: Short-term action is required (few hours, days) to mitigate the risk of downtime.
- High: Immediate action is required to mitigate the risk of downtime, data loss, or data corruption.
- Error: Immediate action is required to fix the issue. Use trace files to help track and resolve the issue.
- Alert: Provides a description of the alert.
- Time: Indicates the time that the alert was triggered.
- Alerting Host and Port: Provides the name and port of the host that issued the alert.
- Source: Indicates where the alert originated from.
- Category: Indicates the category of the alert checker that issued the alert. Alert checkers are grouped into categories. The categories are:
- Availability
- Backup
- Configuration
- CPU
- Diagnosis Files
- Disk
- Memory
- Other
- Security
- Sessions/Transactions
Select Alert Definition (3) to see its definition and more details, such as past occurrences, proposed solutions, and next scheduled runs.
On the alert definition page, you get full details on the alert text and trigger time, source, alert definition, proposed solution, and the number of occurrences over time.
1. Check Now: This button lets you rerun the alert checker. In some cases, you may want to check for a particular alert outside of its configured schedule. Running an alert definition on demand doesn’t change its next configured interval to run. An alert definition must have an active status to run it manually.
2. Edit Alert Definition: This button allows you to tailor the alert definitions in the SAP HANA database to your needs.
3. Details: This tab displays the full alert text to better understand the possible cause of the alert, also it gives the exact time stamp when the alert was triggered and the origin of the alert. The source could be the database itself, or a service such as the SAP EarlyWatch Alert service.
4. Alert Definition Details: This tab displays full details about the alert definition, when the next scheduled run is planned and the schedule interval.
5. Proposed Solution: It gives a possible solution to correct the error that triggered this alert. The solution is provided by SAP and will often include an SAP Note that explains the solution in more detail.
6. Occurrences: This tab gives a graphical representation of all the occurrences of the selected alert over time. The time period to display the occurrences is by default 24 hrs, but can be changed to 7 or 30 days. This overview can be very useful to find the exact moment in time the alerts started to appear. Knowing this moment could help to identify the cause of the alert.
