Optimizing technical monitoring is an essential task for SAP administrators and IT teams who want to ensure the best possible performance and availability of their SAP applications. With the right tools and strategies, you can proactively monitor your SAP applications and quickly identify and address issues before they become major problems.

This blog gives you an overview and insights on how to optimize technical monitoring from a scoping, monitoring scenario, and technical specifications perspective.

Define the scope of your monitoring: Solution Manager offers tons of options to monitor application and implementing them without purpose will be detrimental to the overall landscape monitoring.

Before you start monitoring your SAP applications, you need to define the scope of your monitoring activities. Here are three categories that you need to consider.

1. Business criticality – Consider the business processes and transactions that are most critical to your organization and customize your monitoring scenarios to focus on those areas. Identify critical business systems and prioritize them for monitoring, such as monitoring metrics and thresholds and KPI need to be different for production systems and non-production system. For instance, a S4 Hana Production system has highest criticality in customer landscape, there cannot be any unprecedent downtime for this system whereas as a BW system in same customer might have less critically because of less number of users using this system.
2. Performance requirements: Identify performance requirements and define relevant metrics for each system/component. For instance, monitor response times for critical transactions or CPU usage for high-processing systems Eg: High Enqueue Response Time, Frontend Response Time, Backend Response Time metric which can activated and monitored for performance monitoring.

Using the right monitoring scenarios

1. System and Component Type: Use appropriate monitoring scenarios and thresholds for each system/component. For instance, the monitoring scenarios and threshold should be different for SAP AS ABAP system and AS JAVA system. Using SR: Replication Status alert in case of replication status activated for HANA DB components.
2. Business Requirements: Align monitoring scenarios with your organization’s business goals, such as using SAP CRM monitoring for sales and customer service focus. Activating Monitoring for PI Systems in case of high usage of integration scenarios.
3. Technical Complexity: Customize your monitoring scenarios to reflect the technical complexity of your systems and components. Consider the architecture, infrastructure, and interdependencies of your systems. For E.g., monitoring HA, HANA System replication etc.

Customize your monitoring scenarios: While pre-defined monitoring scenarios are a good starting point, you may need to customize them to meet your specific monitoring needs. This includes modifying the metrics and KPIs that are being monitored, adjusting the threshold values, and configuring alerts to notify the relevant team members when issues occur. Custom HANA Monitoring metrics Monitoring SAP HANA, most metrics are metrics stored in SAP HANA alert tables. However, these tables do not include all the metrics you might be interested in. SAP HANA administrator could use SAP HANA Studio to manually monitor these metrics, e.g. landscape information. To automate the monitoring for this kind of metrics we developed a data collector that pulls this information directly from the corresponding table in HANA.  Use this reference guide to monitor these.

Custom HANA Monitoring metrics

Few Recommendations for metrics which can be considered for optimizing are as follows

• Defining custom templates helps to enhance monitoring specific to your own landscapes for customers.

Follow the steps below to create a custom template.

A) Transaction SOLMAN_SETUP -Go to Application Operations System Monitoring and go to the step Template Maintenance.

B) To create a customer template, determine the managed object and then for determined the managed object type and product version, choose the corresponding SAP template, and choose Create Customer Template. Enter the name of your template in the Template Settings tab. You can also specify the template notification and incident settings

C) Save the template, and specify a collection, if you want to transport it.

D) To use the template for your managed objects, assign it to them, and activate it.

• Alert Priority Calculation- Understanding severity of metrics helps in defining the Priority of Alert. Below SAP Note 2455744 – Solution Manager Technical Monitoring: Alert priority calculation

Fig. 1: The picture above shows the priority calculation as per SAP Note 2455744

• Utilizing Work Mode setting to disable the alerting during Downtime.

As you know if alerting is not disabled during downtime, huge number of false alerts will be generated causing unnecessary repercussions. This SAP note helps in Configuring Work mode settings. Suppress the notifications for a specific object when a given work mode is in process (i.e., you do not want to receive availability alerts when a system is under a Planned Downtime work mode).

2468223 – How to configure work mode specific settings for the Alerting in SAP Solution Manager

Fig. 2: The picture shows a snippet of Work mode

• Use Managed Object (MO) specific settings to enable specific metrics and alerts for a particular system.

When you have created a custom global template but need system specific settings to meticulous alerts, then we need to enable MO specific settings. Below are steps shown to activate :

Fig 3: How to access MO Specific settings

Fig 4: Details of  MO Specific settings

Fig 5: Alerts that can be specified in MO Specific settings

Steps you can follow to evaluate and optimize the technical monitoring for your landscape

• Assess and validate existing System configuration for Solution Manager and Satellite Systems in scope – the prerequisites for technical monitoring i.e. System configuration of Solution Managers and Managed system configuration for the Satellite systems needs to be configured correctly without any issues. This ensures seamless and accurate data collection from satellite system in addition to adhering to the best practices.

Fig 6: Tasks that are to be completed for System preparation

Fig 7: Tasks that are to be completed for Infrastructure Preparation

Fig 8: Tasks that are to be completed for Basic Preparation

• Evaluate current monitoring threshold and alert mechanisms- this process has multiple steps as listed below.
  • Check the alert inbox and identify all the alerts related a satellite system

Fig 9: Screenshot of Alert Inbox 1

• • Summarize the alerts for a particular system. This can be alerts realted to short dumps, memory relates alerts from the OS, CPU utilization etc.

Fig 10: Screenshot of Alert Inbox 2

• • Identify how many times the alert has been generated

Fig 11: screenshot showing all alerts generate

• • Deep dive into the alert and understand the configuration and system behavior.

Fig 12.  Deep dive into alerts

In the above screenshot the alert shown is in red very high as the HANA DB configuration does not meet the requirement of the alert. The point in time recover of the database is not possible as the log mode is set to overwrite. Optimizing this alert can be done in two ways.

First, if the log mode setting is acceptable for instance in case of a test system or a training system, this metric needs to be deactivated in the template and not used in the monitoring scenario.

Second if the point in time recover is indeed needed (for QA system) then the configuration needs to be updated. By doing this the alert shown in their alert inbox is mitigated for future occurrences.

In conclusion, optimizing technical monitoring in SAP Solution Manager is important for ensuring the smooth functioning of your SAP landscape, maximizing system performance and availability, and minimizing the risk of downtime and business disruptions. It helps to improve the efficiency of your IT operations and enables you to proactively address any technical challenges that may arise.