Guide to SAP Monitoring

System monitoring can prove to be one of the most critical and vital processes for an organization. It should be able to analyse the operation’s performance, detect and alert about possible problems in a system.

Having the right system monitoring tools in place makes it easier for errors that may cause crashes, service outages, or failures in the system and servers to be detected 24/7 and solved before they get out of hand.

Having system monitoring tools can be very beneficial to organizations as it can save money in productivity and performance.

What is system monitoring?

System monitoring is the process of gathering the metrics about the operation and performance of the system’s hardware and software to ensure everything works as required to support services and applications.

By performing the operational device checks, you achieve Basic system monitoring, while more advanced monitoring will give a more detailed view of the active statuses.

They include the number of application instances, CPU usage, average response times, error and request rates, and application availability.

What to monitor

System monitoring entails looking at both the data and the different system components like servers, databases, and the rest.

Monitoring different data types

Data can be monitored in three categories to make the system monitoring efficient and reliable. The three data categories include;

• Log data. This refers to information written to a system log record, regardless of whether it’s a simple text or a common structure. Log data gives clear and detailed information of the changes taking place across the system environment.
• Asset data. Asset data is information obtained directly from the asset. The data can vary from key resource metrics like memory and CPU to information about the applications and processes running on a given asset. The data can come in handy when keeping track of events that would not be found in normal log records.
• Network data. This data deals with network performance.it includes routing behaviours, bandwidth, and network connection details.

The systems to monitor

Many essential systems should be monitored 24/7 to avoid standstills when errors occur. Some of the most critical systems include;

• Servers. Sever monitoring entails a wide range of systems, which include file shares, server hosting applications and email servers. It is common for many servers to provide some aspect of event logging regardless of what operating system (OS) a system runs on.
• Databases. Different databases provide distinct access levels which assist the IT administrators to detect and remove the errors or issues that are on the system. Some of the common events which can be accessed from the systems database include cache issues, memory limitations, row limits and slow queries and SQL timeouts.
• Cloud services. Having cloud services is very important for organizations. The cloud Collects and stores all of your records in a single location. This makes it easier to find and access all information later. Having cloud services is essential to a system monitoring plan.
• Employee workstations. It’s important to monitor remotely what’s running in an employees’ machine. This will enable you to quickly find the employee workstations causing errors to the system by monitoring the applications and processes conflicting with the system. Monitoring employee workstations saves on a lot of time compared to tracking down the physical asset.

Metrics and events to monitor

Crud events. It is very important to monitor the data in an application as it goes from creation to deletion. This is essential because it makes the detection of errors easy. While the events taking place between creation to deletion won’t always give direct warning errors, they can provide crucial information when tracking an error to its cause.

Errors. By looking out for the common errors that disrupt the system regularly, one can get a starting position when performing system maintenance. When monitoring the system, you can group the errors you find in terms of type, severity and how often they occur. This will help you to know the events you should monitor first going to the other ones.

Transactions. Errors in the system may cause individual transactions like subscriptions, purchases and cancellations fail to register, and this may hurt the businesses in many ways. Close monitoring should be done on transactions to prevent this from happening. Some transaction errors may be overlooked by the maintenance system and get recorded with useful information; this is why one should be keen on the different transactions

System metrics. To prevent system failures, you should closely monitor basic metrics like memory, CPU, and disk utilization. A forthcoming error or outage in the system could be indicated by abrupt changes on the values shown by the basic metrics.

SAP system monitoring

SAP system monitoring is a process of monitoring computer functions or utilizing system and application servers in an IT environment based on SAP systems.

Investing in SAP monitoring will ensure your organization’s network software performs above or at the expected threshold of IT administrators. SAP system monitoring is an essential practice and should be done daily.

Regular monitoring will enable you to get important information about the status and functionality of critical applications, servers, systems, and connections.

And in case of any errors, they are reported by the system so that immediate action can be taken to rectify them within the shortest period possible.

Main use

SAP monitoring has very many purposes, but the main one is to detect problems in a system early enough and prevent major service outages in the business.

You achieve this by monitoring the functionality and performance of the system. It centrally collects all error alerts from the whole system.

SAP monitoring best practices

To get the best out of SAF monitoring and prevent any inconveniences that may cause downtimes and service outages, one should.

Create an alert system that checks the server status regularly and informs you when there are service outages. The IT admin can write a little script that pings the server every minute and send an email when the server slows or shuts down.

Know when to keep an eye on the servers. SAP system monitoring should always happen for the system to maintain constant availability. Checking on the system daily and regularly can be a very time-consuming job, but when you know what to look out for and the critical times to do, it becomes straightforward. Some of the times you should keep a keen eye on your system maintenance include;

• System updates. One needs to be very keen during updates as its very common for them to cause unintended crashes to the system or even the updates themselves failing.
• Peak transaction times. Many businesses know their peak transaction periods, and during these times, errors are expected. To prevent this, the IT admin should be very keen on the system monitor so as to solve the errors as they come.
• Migrations. Data migrations can prove to be a challenge for the system and may result in authentication issues and mismatched data types. You are required to be very keen when dealing with data migrations.

Monitoring SAP performance accurately

To monitor SAP performance accurately, one needs to collect statistics of the system metrics over some time. The statistics gathered are used to form a baseline that will be used as a benchmark to show what is normal and what is slow or inaccurate performance.

The system guard assists in measuring the response times, CPU usage, and other metrics over time and automatically creates sap systems statistics. It then creates a graphical representation of the data to be used as a benchmark to measure SAP performance accurately.

The system guard also makes alerts when metrics fall below the normal operating baselines; this is how it sends alerts to IT Admins when there is a decline in the system’s performance. Monitoring can be done using android phones.

SAP System monitoring tools

SAP monitoring requires tools for different purposes in order to work efficiently and detect errors in a system. The monitoring tools use different SAP transaction codes to monitor and check the various running processes. Some of the tools are;

Consistency checking (SICK): This tool is used to check for inconsistency in the system.

Check application servers (SM51): This transaction enables you to see all application server instances in the SAP system and monitor and change their states.

Work process overview (SM51): This transaction enables you to see the different work processes, and the state they are in.it also shows how many work processes are in use.

Systemwide work process overview (SM66): This tool enables systemwide monitoring of work processes without logging into every server one by one. The potential cause of a system performance problem can be easily found because all the work processes on all SAP application servers are displayed on your screen.

Background job processing (SM36): This tool enables you to run background processes behind the normal interactive operations without disturbing them.

SAP transport management tool (STMS): This is the tool that caters to all transport functions in central management and monitoring of SAP systems.

ABAP Dump analysis (ST22): This transaction is used to list the ABAP runtime errors in the ABAP system. It indicates the transaction code variables that caused the error and the reason for the error.

Backup logs overview (DB12): Novaline ABAP optimizer. This is an automated solution to accelerate slow SAP reports, scan ABAP codes for performance vulnerabilities, and improve SAP performance.

Detecting and solving issues

Issues can be detected by monitoring the various processes running in the system. Depending on the relevant settings put up, alerts are triggered in case the threshold values are exceeded. Monitoring is done through SAP transaction codes on the various processes.

Latest trends in SAP

SAP S/4HANA. This is the next-generation data management platform for digital transformation.

S/4HANA frees up valuable resources and human capital for new and innovative application development to meet your business’s strategic objectives.

Cloud computing. This is a method of processing and storing, plus managing a network in remote servers hosted on the internet rather than on a local server.

Machine learning. Machine learning (ML) is an application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that educates computers on how to perform a task by learning the data, rather than having a Predefined set of Programs.

Blockchain. This is a series of data about transactions through cryptocurrencies between consecutive peers that cannot be altered. It is one of the fast-emerging and well-known trends in SAP. It has the potential of disrupting every other industry.

When looking for computing solutions for your organization or individually, SAP has got you covered on all fronts from database management, server security, and even cloud servers and storage. Sap will ensure your servers and systems are always up and healthy with next to zero service outages.