It's best-practice to regularly back up your operating system and database to restore the SAP system should the need arise. Hence one of the chief responsibilities of an SAP Administrator and/or DBA/SysAdmin is to have an appropriate method for performing this set of duties, preferably through some automation.
Most SAP systems today are heavily dependent on critical background jobs to power the business processes. As much as there are focus on the latest UX/UI and user interactions, the facts are more than 60% of SAP business suite systems are consumed by background processing. So much so that some of IT-Conductor's customers want to focus our monitoring primarily on background processing and related alerts and performance.
Printing from SAP is an important function of the business application. It is a specialized area of focus due to the critical dependency of most business processes such as invoicing, bill of materials, packing slips, pay checks, etc. We have experience with customers whose manufacturing production line literally stops when the print jobs from SAP fails. Even with today's electronic output format such as Adobe PDF, the delivery of these documents to the recipient stops when the Adobe Document Services (ADS) fails.
SAP operations is normally managed by:
In today's enterprises, there are often very complex business processes managed by SAP ecosystem often involving transactions, batch jobs, process chains, messages, documents (iDocs, BDocs, etc.) and a myriad of inter-dependencies. Regardless of how they are designed, failure of these activities is not a question of IF but a question of WHEN, because they depend on systems, data, business logic and sometimes just human error.
How does IT-Conductor help customers manage their business-critical processes so when failures occur, errors are monitored, responsible party notified, assist in the root-cause analysis and resolution of the issue? We will describe our approach to SAP job monitoring and management as an example scenario which is currently used by customers to remotely manage large number of jobs, process chains, messages, and many more critical services 24x7.
Job Monitoring in SAP is probably as old of an issue as monitoring SAP itself! See our post on What to Monitor When You're Not Monitoring SAP
The nature of background jobs is such that they need to be monitored and there are several ways to do so: