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?
The idea is to always collect monitoring data from as many service components as possible and practical and store them in useful format for performance intelligence. Still, you are not really monitoring it - it's not practical when you have many systems and not enough resources. You need a tool to do it, so you will have it and it can be available for analysis or proactive management if needed. When we engage with customers on monitoring projects, they often have a wish list. Many of them have common requirements, so we've composed a list you might find useful as metrics or alerts to add to your specific list if they are not already on there, CCMS already collect many of them but they may not be in useful format.
If this list seems like a lot, that doesn't even cover application specific monitoring like J2EE, Enterprise Portals, CRM, SCM, BW, etc. That's the reason why many SAP customers struggle to efficiently and effectively manage the performance and alert data, even with Solutions Manager due to the management overhead.
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