Best Practice 1.3 – Implement application and database monitoring for SAP

Set up your application and database monitoring to provide information about its internal state, status, and achievement of business outcomes. Some examples include transaction response time, available work processes, queue depth, error and dump messages, stalled batch jobs, and transaction throughput. Use this information to determine when a corrective action is required.

Suggestion 1.3.1 - Implement monitoring for databases supporting SAP applications

Continually monitor your SAP databases and establish alerts for common problems that can affect SAP system availability and performance. Common monitoring items include the following:

Base alerting thresholds on healthy patterns of historical productive usage of your system. Continually review and adjust your alarm thresholds to prevent problems and to react to workload changes or growth.

For details on how to enable monitoring for your specific database, see your database software provider installation and operational guides.

Consider Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights for SAP HANA databases to analyze metric patterns using historical data to detect anomalies, and continuously track errors and exceptions from HANA, operating system, and infrastructure logs.

Suggestion 1.3.2 - Use SAP transactions and tools to understand the SAP application

Configure your SAP applications to provide information about their internal state, status, and the achievement of business outcomes. Use this information to determine when a response is required. Common monitoring items include the following:

Set up the SAP EarlyWatch Alert reporting system in SAP Solution Manager to create regular reports on the status of your SAP systems. Regularly review and remediate issues found in these reports to prevent problems and avoid interruptions to workload service.

Suggestion 1.3.3 - Implement monitoring for your data recovery and protection mechanisms

Implement monitoring for mechanisms that safeguard your SAP data in the case of a failure or disaster. Common monitoring items include:

See the following links for further information:

Suggestion 1.3.4 - Expose SAP monitoring data outside of SAP tools for independent observability

SAP monitoring tools are limited to application and operating system level monitoring and do not cover the wide range of supporting services that give an end-to-end view of SAP service availability and health. Configure your SAP applications to provide metrics to a more holistic, external monitoring and visualization tool of your choice.

Use the metrics collected in the previous best practices and externalize these results such that you have an independent tool which can monitor, alert, and report on trends. An independent tool allows observability, root cause analysis, historical and trend reporting without being linked to the SAP system’s availability (that is, when SAP is in a disaster or fault mode).