Learn how to eliminate the overhead and expense of manual monitoring, configuration and deployment.
This interactive webcast covered best practices for monitoring SAP and demonstrate Nimsoft Monitor, which provides:
A comprehensive view into the status and operation of SAP ECC, ABAP and JAVA NetWeaver components as well as the networks, physical and virtual servers, databases and storage SAP runs on.
Easy, template-driven configuration to automate deployment across multiple landscapes.
A knowledge base of best-practices performance indicators to monitor as well as recommended thresholds to accelerate setup.
Visit www.nimsoft.com for more information.
SAP definition:Systeme, Anwendungen, Produkte in der DatenverarbeitungGerman: Systems, Applications & Products in Data Processing; SAP AG
In the years 2000’s, implementing a SAP system was quite simple. It was a long time to install but less complex to manage.SAP brought new technologies in the year’s 2005 with more complexity especially with more interconnected products and modulesToday, SAP is now definitely more complex with different built-in technologies like ABAP or Java stacks but also huhe and complex integration with other products and communication layers.Question: what about the future?New SAP technologies are already emerging like In Memory (HANA) or Sybase, but also more interconnected applications in the cloud and mobile use of the applications. Future SAP technology will be even more complex than today
SAP complexity looks like this, your SAP is not anymore a stand alone system or landscape. It is now in most of the cases open to the internet and communication world providing strong component interactions.Within such architectures, delays and losses can be huge, reputation might be impacted if something goes wrong, as well as direct or indirect salesRegardless of the scope of a problem, reducing the time-to-resolution has a financial impact on your business (losing the Printing capacity in some shipping departments…) ($199,000 per hour = $3300 per minute!)Talking about people to maintain these landscapes, we usually count 1 SAP BASIS employee for 1 SAP Landscape while manual monitoring is consuming 1 to 2 hours per SAP landscape. Manual also = prone to errors.With the right tools, you can automate manual monitoring steps and increase the reliability of your SAP systemsDon’t forget that the complexity always keeps growingQuestion: what about SAP virtualization, is it bringing some simplicity?Yes and no. The virtualization, especially full virtualization up to production systems, brings incredible flexibility and simplicity to manage SAP. IBM Live Partition Mobility let you for example move a SAP instance from a server to another, or from a site to another without disconnection of your end-users. You can also assign on the fly more memory or CPU to power consuming SAP instances and with the only limit of your hardware capacities. You can imagine the added-value of this technology during a finance closing, a migration or support package operation or even a Data center site maintenance. In the other hand, this technology is still complex to setup and the associated processes to maintain also.
This slide helps you to understand SAP complexity through its different infrastructure and application layersThis is a real challenge with SAP to find where are coming my performance or stability issues? Moreover, we have to manage all SAP products interactions like RFC connection, BI data uploads, PI mappings and data exchange.. Each layer can be managed separately but is connected to the others.I am going now to explain how we improve global SAP support for our customers using 5 best practices we’ve developed over time.Question: is there a way to monitor SAP business processes? Yes, SAP has his own internal Business process monitoring engine, which controls and monitors all functional processes
Taking care of an integrated application is a bottom-up strategy. You can compare it to a tree:-> Infrastructure is the trunk-> Applications are the branches-> Users are the leavesEach component must be checked and monitored carefully to avoid any individual failuresThis can be done by individual tools and even manually and split between the IT and SAP teams, which is probably the worth scenario you can build to manage your SAP systemsQuestion?
A weakness shared by most standard monitoring tools is that they only report system failures after the eventDetecting and managing abnormal events is a real challenge in SAP: is one ABAP DUMP critical for your production system? One, perhaps not, but 30 probably. However, 30 ABAP DUMPs in one day might be not so important but 30 in less than 2 minutes is definitely something to check.If this DUMP tells you that he is not able to process a batch input or write to an external file system, you have probably only few hours to react perhaps less.In this case, your alerting system must send you the right alarm in due time to let you solve the issue before it impacts the business or end-users. You may have time to correct your batch input, extend the file system or correct its security settings before having some user complaintsQuestion:?
All SAP related infrastructure and application components are linked together, IT components but also RFC, SAP products like BI, GTS, SCM. Interconnected components monitoring is covered through different methods and tools but is definitely more efficient if you can build a common monitoring layer for all related components.We had this with one of our customers, an emerging I/O storage controller error, producing network loops. The controller was producing errors slowing down the site replication. It took 8 hours before impacting the main site and the SAP application itself and 4 hours to discover the cause of the issue.Standard SAP tools won’t show you the level of detail for non-SAP components you need to quickly troubleshoot and isolate root cause. Root Cause analysis can be a long time consuming process before you discover a hardware issueQuestion?Reminder JFEvent correlation can be decomposed into four steps: event filtering, event aggregation, event masking and root cause analysis.
60% of your performance issues are coming from SAP internally and directly from the SAP users activity. High loads of transactions and programs, program errors, long time reporting's, Z-class and non-optimized programs, simultaneous user connections and lock tables entries, monthly closings and reportingFor each step, you have a method, process or tool that you can setup. This is a continuous improvement process and a strong collaboration between your SAP CC and the business but also with your key-usersQuestion: Can you tell us more about printing optimization?By default, all printings are stored in the SAP database, producing high volume of data in the spools and computed daily by the production SAP systems. We met some customers with almost 8 millions of printed page per month. This can be optimized in several ways. First of all, checking your spools and their retention times, training the user to reprint from the spool transaction and not to rerun the transaction with for some read of million of records.The best solution is however to implement an output management solution, moving the printing management to a 3rd party dedicated and specialized tool and reducing drastically the paper use and print production
The most important KPI is probably the user perception indicator, mostly linked to the system performance and availability at the user point of view.While your system reports a good health, your service desk can still be overloaded by incidents and user complaints, immediately impacting the IT image. “The system is slow” is probably the more used terminology coming from the end-users. At what time, running what transaction or program, on what workstation, in what country or region? These are probably our most frequent questions to our SAP end-users, especially when we don’t have any method or tool to know this in advance.So, the best practice is definitely to setup both Service desk and monitoring KPI’s with correlated events connection, enabling a business impact view and a real perception of your SAP performanceQuestion: what would be your suggestion for enabling such Key Perception Indicators?First of all, do not expect the business to be reasonable in term of availability, data loss or restore time, they always ask for non stop systems, absolutely no data loss and instantaneous restore of the system.So, prepare your SLA’s, planned activities, maintenance windows and dashboards with your IT and SAP management Explain the architecture currently in place, its possible availability, RTO, RPO capability. Then build your Unified Monitoring Portal with both your service desk and monitoring tools and provide a the business views and SLA’s that every one is expectingJF reminder: The recovery point objective (RPO): how much data can I afford to loseThe recovery time objective (RTO): how long you can basically go without a specific application
My last recommendation would be to “make your SAPmonitoring the best value to increase your SAP CC performance, reduce your risks and achieve your SLA’s”