In the world of modern enterprise technology, where every second counts and data reigns supreme, managing complex SAP solutions landscapes without the right support tools and resources can sometimes feel like an uphill battle.

This is where SAP Monitoring comes in to help, offering advanced full-stack monitoring tools and data management capabilities to transform your organization’s IT operations and ensure their SAP environment functions as properly, no matter what.

In this article, we’ll discuss the key components and capabilities of SAP Monitoring, how it can revolutionize how companies monitor and manage their critical SAP applications, and where our team of expert SAP consultants can fit in your organization.

What is System Monitoring in the SAP System?

The System Monitoring application in the SAP Solution Manager offers a comprehensive overview of a company’s core business processes and technical systems, including hosts, databases, associated instances, and more.

SAP System Monitoring functionality is based on a template concept, meaning customers can utilize preconfigured templates as the basis for building their own unique monitoring templates. The SAP Monitoring application also conducts regular system checks based on four main categories: Availability, Configuration, Exceptions, and Performance, making it easier to define and manage key metrics and thresholds for each managed object.

With SAP Monitoring capabilities, users are enabled to:

  • Create visualizations for key metrics and events with current ratings and last-reported values
  • Display historical metric values and other critical business data in a comprehensive metric monitor
  • Generate status overviews for all areas of the SAP landscape, including databases, hosts, and instances across all current SAP solutions
  • Leverage drill-down capabilities to gain insights into technical system statuses and other system-monitoring data
  • Visualize system metrics and events, including current ratings, values, thresholds, and more

Common Use Cases for the SAP Solution Manager

Technical monitoring resources in the SAP Monitoring application allow business users to proactively identify issues and prevent significant disruptions, making monitoring and maintaining the general health of their SAP services landscape easier.

Here are a few common use cases addressed by the System Monitoring application:

  • Proactive system monitoring: Leverage intelligent monitoring tools to identify SAP performance problems before they cause more significant issues or unexpected system downtime.
  • Centralized data center: Utilize a single source of truth to collect critical alerts and business data from all systems in your SAP landscape in one place.
  • Data transparency: Improve data transparency and gain insights into the overall health of critical SAP resources, systems, and applications.

Main Advantages of the SAP System Monitoring Solution

SAP Monitoring is a crucial tool for ensuring the continuous and efficient operation of a company’s SAP landscape, empowering organizations to maintain the reliability and security of their SAP infrastructure, optimize SAP performance, and meet compliance obligations.

Here are the top five main advantages of the SAP Monitoring application:

Proactive Issue Resolution:

SAP Monitoring content provides real-time alerts and notifications, identifying the root cause of issues and enabling proactive resolution. Administrators can address problems as they arise, minimizing system downtime and preventing disruptions to existing business operations.

Performance Optimization:

The application’s performance monitoring capabilities help organizations identify SAP performance bottlenecks and resource utilization trends, ensuring a seamless user experience and optimal system operations.

Enhanced Security:

Security monitoring and alerting features within SAP Monitoring help organizations detect and respond to security incidents, unauthorized access attempts, and suspicious user activities. This enhances the overall security posture of SAP systems and keeps critical business data secure over time.

Compliance and Audit Readiness:

By tracking and auditing system activities, SAP Monitoring software supports compliance requirements, helps organizations maintain audit readiness, and provides detailed information for compliance reporting and investigations.

Efficient Resource Allocation:

SAP Monitoring’s capacity planning and resource utilization insights enable organizations to allocate resources efficiently. This reduces infrastructure costs and ensures that resources are available when needed, supporting business scalability across all SAP services and solutions.

List of Tools for Monitoring SAP Systems

Process SAP System Messages: Use short messages to send important information to all users logged on to the SAP system. Messages are displayed once a day when a user logs on to the system and as soon as the message is sent if they’re already logged in.

Workload Monitor: Analyze statistical data on the ABA kernel to identify the root cause of potential problems with system performance. Leverage various data sources and analysis views to display total values for all system instances, monitor response time distribution, manage critical business transactions, and compare the performance of specific instances over time.

Consistency Check: Run the consistency check directly after installation to determine inconsistencies in the system and resolve issues before they become more significant problems.

Display and Manage User Sessions: Manage user sessions and see which users are logged into the SAP system at any given time. Display all active users in one place and gain insight into which resources are being used to optimize resource allocation and utilization across the board.

System Log: Log files, warnings, and errors in one comprehensive system record.

HTTP Logging: Record all HTTP requests and evaluate resulting log files to maintain proper functionality across the SAP Message Server and Internet Communication Manager (ICM) system components.

Database Monitor: Monitor important performance indicators in the database system, including database size, database indexes, and the quality of each database buffer. Works with any database system supported by SAP to improve access, analysis, and management of critical statistics.

Display and Control Work Processes: Access and analyze business processes belonging to each system instance, manage work processes, and assess the utilization of each work process.

Navigating the Setup Process for SAP Monitoring Tools

1) System Overview

The first step of the system monitoring process involves generating an overview of the monitoring configuration, including technical systems like hosts and DBMS. It also reflects the current configuration status of the system monitoring infrastructure to help users plan for future monitoring activities.

2) Infrastructure Configuration

The second step involves various sub-steps that help users configure the monitoring interface:

  • Prerequisites: Leverage automatic activities to check prerequisites for configuring the System and Application Monitoring infrastructure.
  • Manual configuration: Perform manual activities to easily configure the System and Application Monitoring infrastructure and navigate the Extractor Framework and Content Customization tools.
  • Default settings: Enable or disable specific functions in the infrastructure and manage incidents, notifications, third-party components, and automatic alert confirmation.
  • Reporting settings: Activate BI-based reporting content and execute a health check on the readiness of the SAP Solution Manager.
  • Housekeeping: Specify metric lifetimes in the Alert and Event Store, assess retention times for different aggregation measures, and complete housekeeping activities to maintain an efficient and effective Alert Store.
  • Work mode settings: Configure standard behavior for the System Monitoring application, outline settings for all alerts and metrics, remove flags for previous work modes as needed, and manage critical business objects more effectively.
  • Content updates: Apply new content versions to SAP Monitoring content, build and manage monitoring templates, outline changes in the new content version, and easily identify and implement new content versions as needed.

3) Template Maintenance

Users can outline definitions or values of metrics, events, and alerts (MEA) of incidents and notifications, create custom metrics in a custom template, define custom alerts, and receive notifications for managed objects within the SAP landscape.

4) Scope Definition

In this step, users can identify the managed objects, databases, and hosts required to configure system monitoring capabilities and prepare the software for a new technical system.

5) System Setup Monitoring

Users can assign monitoring templates to the managed systems in scope, ensuring databases, managed objects, database instances, and hierarchies are configured and managed properly. After verifying the correct assignment of templates, users can apply and activate the monitoring configuration to the directory tables and overwrite specific template settings for managed objects.

6) Complete Setup

In the final step, all previous configuration process steps are displayed, and the assigned templates are activated within the existing SAP landscape.

Understanding Custom Template Design for Improved Monitoring

Custom templates empower organizations to establish custom monitoring strategies, enabling them to focus on the specific metrics and aspects that align with their unique business needs. Organizations gain a more comprehensive view of their system’s health by building custom templates tailored to the performance, availability, security, and compliance requirements of their existing SAP landscape.

These templates act as a guide for system configuration and monitoring over time, allowing users to receive proactive alerts and notifications when predefined thresholds are met, enabling efficient issue resolution, and minimizing system downtime across their entire SAP landscape.

As organizations evolve and embrace complex IT landscapes, understanding custom template design becomes an essential aspect of effective SAP Monitoring, ensuring actionable insights are available, ultimately improving the efficiency, reliability, and security of critical SAP systems.

Creating Custom System Monitoring Metrics and Alerts

Creating custom metrics in SAP Monitoring allows organizations to tailor their monitoring strategies to specific requirements, enabling deeper insights into their SAP systems’ performance, availability, security, and compliance.

Here’s a list of the main steps involved in creating custom metrics in SAP Monitoring:

  1. Navigate to a custom template and change to Expert Mode.
  2. Create and select Metric from the drop-down list and specify metric attributes and assignments in the Custom Metric Creation Wizard.
  3. Complete the name, class, category, technical name, and data type for each custom metric in the Overview tab.
  4. Select required data collectors and enter parameter values for each managed object.
  5. Define thresholds for alerting.
  6. Assign custom metrics to an alert in the SAP system.
  7. Save the custom template and ensure the custom template can be found in the metrics table.

Creating custom alerts in SAP Monitoring enables organizations to proactively respond to critical events and conditions within their SAP systems. It’s a powerful tool for tailoring alerting strategies to specific business requirements and ensuring the continuity and efficiency of SAP landscapes.

Here’s a list of the main steps involved in creating custom alerts in SAP Monitoring:

  1. Navigate to a custom template and change to Expert Mode.
  2. Create and select Alert from the drop-down list and specific alert attributes and assignments in the Custom Alert Creation Wizard.
  3. Define the alert name, severity, and category in the Overview tab, and define the priority of each alert within the SAP landscape.
  4. Configure incidents, third-party components, and notifications in the Maintain Custom Template section.
  5. Specify event rules to be applied to the custom alert and metric.
  6. Assign previously configured custom metrics to the custom alert.
  7. Save the custom template and ensure the corresponding monitoring data can be displayed and received in the SAP Monitoring system.

How Can We Help?

Whether you need help getting C-suite and SAP Basis teams on board with new SAP solutions, additional support building SAP best practices into your system configuration and monitoring strategies, or just an extra hand managing integrations between your SAP applications and other systems, Surety Systems can help.

Our senior-level, US-based SAP consultant team has the technical knowledge, functional skills, and real-world experience to handle your most important SAP project needs and maximize your investment in the long run.

Getting Started with Our Team

Interested in learning how SAP Monitoring can improve business operations and the efficiency of your critical enterprise resource planning operations or where our team of SAP consultants can fit in your organization?

Contact us today!