How to Monitor SAP Solution Manager

  

We have been publishing extensively with more than a dozen articles on How to monitor your SAP environment using SAP Solution Manager, but what happens when Solman itself is suffering from Performance and Availability issues?  Solman has widened its footprint at enterprises, some mandatory uses of functionality such as Maintenance Optimizer, and Remote Support, while others include Technical Monitoring and Change Request Management (ChaRM).  Given such dependencies of many SAP customers on their Solman, shouldn't it be monitored and managed as a business-critical system?

The Brewing Problem

It's not the first time, nor probably the last time that customers asked for help with their Solman.  As recently as a few months ago, one customer's Solman was crippling slow, full of error logs, sometimes inaccessible, and occasionally down.  Yet nobody knew why.  Solman has gotten so complex that there are lots of breaking points, and these are just technical non-business scenarios:

  • ABAP stack and the JAVA stack - the last SAP dual-stack system left,
  • Numerous remote connections in and out of it,
  • Outdated credentials for managed systems in technical monitoring,
  • Outdated client software for remote DB connections
  • Outdated CR Content for the System Landscape Directory (SLD)
  • Outdated Landscape Management Database (LMDB)
  • Patches and security updates

To make matters worse, the businesses and other IT teams want to roll out more use cases for Solman, and the Basis team is left wondering if they should hire a full-time Solman consultant, update/upgrade Solman, size up infrastructure, or just outsource its management.

The Real Dilemma

If Solman is SAP monitoring all your systems, what's monitoring it?  In most cases, NOTHING!  When it's slow or non-responsive or worse yet failing to monitor your SAP landscape, how do you troubleshoot problems and find root causes?  Of course, you can install or use another Solman, perhaps use your Development/QA Solman and hook it up to monitor your Production Solman. There are a couple of potential issues with this approach, we assume customers already lack Solman resources dedicated to the task, and secondly, we're not aware that there is a Solman monitoring scenario inside SOLMAN_SETUP besides the Self-monitoring capabilities that can't be used when your system is the problem itself.  Yes, you can just set it up as a standard dual-stack SAP Netweaver system, but that's not really monitoring Solman's features - just standard CCMS.

Monitoring SAP Solution Manager WITHOUT Solman

Use IT-Conductor and monitor your Solman's Availability, Performance, and more!

Here is a summary list of problems we uncovered in no particular order of importance:

  • SAP Patches Can Fix or Break SAP Performance
  • RFC Processing bottlenecks: significant roll-in wait times for RFC combined with high utilization of Dialog work processes
  • Queue RFC errors coming in from connected systems
  • Missing database metrics due to failing DB data collection jobs
  • Missing database primary indexes, based on standard DB checks
  • Database logs indicating misconfigured parameters affecting performance
  • Invalid/Misconfigured SAP and Database monitoring connections
  • Outdated or non-functional SAP HostAgent and SAPOSCOL causing self and remote monitoring issues
  • E2E (End-to-end) monitoring hogging many dialog processes due to parallel HTTP calls from external SMD agents
  • Java Dispatcher configuration out of threads to handle many remote agents
  • SAP Buffer misconfiguration and related performance issues
  • OS memory and CPU utilization and capacity shortage
  • Availability issues with Solman and connected RFC systems

The Results

Improved uptime and performance of Solman, the simple way!

You can have the best of both worlds:

  • Use Solman for what you have to, and need to
  • Use external solutions to keep Solman available and performing

Looking for an integrated solution to help with many of the SAP Performance and Availability management needs?  Try IT-Conductor, engineered as a cloud-based SAP Performance management and monitoring platform.  We also offer SAP Performance management as a Service!

 

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