Best Practice 1.1 – Implement prerequisites for monitoring SAP on AWS

SAP certification requirements for SAP on AWS are outlined in SAP Note 1656250. This note includes instructions for setting up the AWS Data Provider for SAP, enabling Amazon CloudWatch detailed monitoring, and using SAP enhanced monitoring for SAP NetWeaver solutions. Enabling these prerequisites helps ensure that your SAP workload state is able to be fully understood and investigated by AWS and SAP. These prerequisites should feed into your overall SAP monitoring strategy.

Suggestion 1.1.1 - Check SAP support prerequisites

Check SAP Note 1656250 on the SAP support portal for the most up-to-date support requirements for SAP on AWS workloads. Follow the detailed instructions in this note.

Suggestion 1.1.2 - Install AWS Data Provider for SAP NetWeaver workloads

The AWS Data Provider for SAP is a required installation on each of your EC2 instances supporting SAP NetWeaver workloads. The AWS Data Provider for SAP is an agent which collects performance-related metrics from AWS services and provides them to the SAP internal application monitoring system. SAP tools, such as transaction code ST06n and Solution Manager monitoring that use external metrics usually collected from the SAPOSCOL service, require the AWS Data Provider for SAP to access AWS metrics.

There are indirect costs associated with running the AWS Data Provider for SAP because of the detailed monitoring and increased API calls required for SAP to receive monitoring data at specific intervals. See AWS Data Provider for SAP - Introduction - Pricing for details.

Suggestion 1.1.3 - Create a monitoring strategy for your SAP workloads

Decide how you will observe the current and historical health of your SAP application from both an inside-out and outside-in perspective. Consider all components which work together to provide the end-user experience. Consider how you will capture metrics from underlying AWS compute, storage, and network services in addition to internal SAP application metrics and external user performance and reliability monitoring. Evaluate different tools for each component and decide how you can bring these together in a single place (for example, log aggregation) to perform root cause analysis when needed. Determine how you will use this information to design alert thresholds and remediation actions to be taken when thresholds are breached.

Understand the capabilities of SAP Solution Manager monitoring, third-party monitoring tools, and CloudWatch dashboards that can ingest custom SAP monitoring metrics as a starting point for your design.