IT-Conductor Blog

With contributions from David Stavisski, Femi Charles, and Linh Nguyen 

SAP Teched 2017 Las Vegas covered many sessions on SAP Solution Manager 7.2 (Solman 7.2). When it comes to technical SAP monitoring and basis operations, we have gotten just as many questions about how different is Solman 7.2 in comparison to Solman 7.1 as well as IT-Conductor.  We have published many guides for deploying Solman technical monitoring and comparing it to other tools available, so we recommend you check out some of the following posts and make your informed decisions about whether to upgrade, reimplement and/or use Solman 7.2 for SAP monitoring.

• Solution Manager 7.2 Monitoring Setup and Configuration eBook
• HANA and SAP Monitoring Comparison Matrix - in 9 capability areas
• Still on Solman 7.1? See Solution Manager Technical Monitoring

IT-Conductor customers went to Teched with one less worry since we are actively monitoring the availability and performance of their SAP applications WITHOUT Solman, so they are free to focus on other projects.

---

INTRODUCTION

Ever want to collectively view many KPI's across multiple SAP systems and infrastructure components, even across many sites or locations?  It's always been a challenge to do so, especially to monitor SAP, analyze or trend performance end-to-end and see the big picture at the same time.  It's a best practice to use such capability in an application performance management (APM) tool as we discussed in our 10 Ways to Better Application-Centric Service Management Best Practices.  Recently in our first IT-Conductor Newsletter February 23, 2017 edition, we announced the availability of a feature to Save Custom Service Charts (KPI's).  The ability to see KPI's across multiple monitored services had been there for years, but recently we allowed users to save and view them, and even schedule reports for them as a Saved Service Health Chart.

---

INTRODUCTION:

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 widen 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?

SAP Basis folks often frown upon the task of SAP monitoring.  I'll gladly admit that it's not a glamorous task and is normally laborious, especially troubleshooting or trying to generate reports.   I'm sure if you can delegate it among your team members, you probably would. Monitoring becomes something one does when there's a problem, or at critical times like go-lives and busy processing window.  That's not really active monitoring.  Then there's the question of what to monitor when you actually do it, because you may need different information for each situation.  So, what should we monitor when we're not really monitoring SAP? 

Typically a SAP Production system has many customer defined RFC connections to partner systems and TCP/IP interfaces.  These interfaces are critical to the availability of the whole system landscape.  Examples include ECC to BW connections, CRM to ECC, SCM to PI to ECC, etc.

More and more SAP customers have been migrating their databases to SAP ASE (formerly Sybase), which raised the need to monitor and manage ASE's availability and performance.

Taking a play-card from our OZSoft HANA Management Pack for SCOM powered by IT-Conductor, we are able to agentlessly monitor ASE combined with SAP HOSTAGENT for outside discovery and availability monitoring.  As discussed in the HANA monitoring using Synthetics article, we also offer SAP ASE customers the ability to monitor via native synthetic transactions directly against the database with the release of OZSoft ASE Management Pack for SCOM v1.0.2.