Month: March 2021

Self monitoring…

When using Focused Run you monitor systems. But how about the health and stability of the monitoring tool itself? Here is where self monitoring plays an important role.

Questions that will be answered are:

  • What to check in self monitoring?
  • How much metrics are collected and stored in my Focused Run installation?

Self monitoring

Self monitoring can be started with the Self Monitoring FIORI tile:

If you click the tile the overview page comes:

The interesting part is unfortunately hidden in the below screen (you need to scroll), which is the CPU utilisation.

The other interesting part is the amount of data collected and stored. This is not so interesting for yourself, but more interesting for your manager to show how much data HANA can handle, or to show how much work is really automated.

Simple diagnostics agent

On the top left icons, click on the Simple DA agent button to get the agent overview screen:

Important here:

  • Check that all agents are up
  • Check that all agent versions are not too old

Monitoring and Alerting Infrastructure

The next option is to check the MAI (monitoring and alerting infrastructure) data collection:

Important here is to fix the systems in error.

Wiley Introscope

The Wiley option will show if your Wiley Introscope connected to Focused Run is ok. Wiley is used for special use cases like JAVA and Business Objects products.

Managed system overview

The managed system overview gives the overview of the diverse systems and application status:

Any red or yellow item can mean a setup issue. But it can also be because of missing authorizations and privileges of the Focused Run technical user in the connected managed system.

Central component monitoring

The central component monitoring shows the overview of the central components:

Alert management: mail notification…

The alert management function is a central alert inbox function for SAP Focused Run. All alerts from all tools are coming together in the alert inbox. For full overview of functions, read this blog. This specific blog will zoom in to the option in alert management to send mails for the alert.

Questions that will be answered are:

  • How can I configure Focused Run to send mails for specific alert situations?
  • How can I setup multiple mail receivers?
  • How can I setup multiple mail groups?
  • How can I change the layout of the mail?

Setting up alert consumer

First we will set up the alert consumer. Goto the Alert Consumer Variant configuration tile:

In the next screen click on the Plus symbol to create a new Alert Consumer:

Initially there is no mail template and no recipient list.

We will create these in the steps below. When these are created, they can be used in the drop downs. Save the consumer and don’t forget to put the status to Active.

Maintain recipient list

From the alert consumer screen create a new recipient list:

Give it a name and add the e-mail addresses for the group. There can be one or multiple. Save the list.

Maintain e-mail template

Create a new e-mail template:

On the left hand side you can see the variables you can use. On the right hand side you construct the mail template. Preview is possible but shows limited functionality only. Save after you are happy with the mail.

Using the alert consumer

Now we have created the alert consumer with the mail template and recipient list. We can goto the monitoring template maintenance to assign the alert consumer. In the alerts tab of the template that you want to alert on, goto the Alerts tab:

For the type of alert switch the Automatic notification to Use Variant. In the Notifications tab below, you can now assign the created variant. Save the settings.

After the template change: do not forget to Apply and Activate the template for use.

Testing and mail sending

To test your settings: use a development system or sandbox to test your event. Then check in SOST that the mail is properly created:

Focused Run license and usage…

SAP Focused Run is a licensed product. The metric is amount of GB stored in the application.

If you have more systems, more detailed metrics, with short measurement times and many functions, the more GB you will use.

Questions that will be answered in this blog are:

  • How to check the current license usage?
  • What drives the usage?
  • How can I get a cost estimate?
  • How can I create a business case for Focused Run?

Checking the license usage

In SE38 start program FRUN_USAGE_UPDATE:

Now you can see which Focused Run function uses how many MB’s.

What drives the usage?

Usage is driven by:

Getting a cost estimate

Your SAP account manager or the Focused Run team in Germany can give you a good cost estimate. Material number for Focused Run in the price list is 7019453.

Input for cost estimate: sizes and numbers of systems, functions of Focused Run you want to deploy, and the retention period of the data.

Output: cost estimate.

Creating the business case

The business case has 2 aspects:

  • Cost: infrastructure, license, implementation
  • Benefits

Benefits is easier to quantify if your IT service is more mature.

Elements to consider:

  • How much does an hour of outage cost on your main ECC or S4HANA core system? For lager companies, this is easily 10.000 Euro per hour or more.
  • How much does your complaint handling cost per ticket?
  • How much time is currently spent on manual monitoring?

Benefits of Focused Run are then in avoiding half the outages by faster insights and reducing the outage costs. You cannot avoid all outages, but you can act faster.

Benefits of Focused Run are in improved clean up and issue solving. This will both reduce issues in your systems and reduce complaints and tickets you need to handle.

For larger system landscapes (more than 50 systems) the business case is quite easy to create and will be positive fast.

System analysis…

System analysis is part of the Root Cause analysis functions of Focused Run. It can be used for issues analysis of current issues and for longer term trending.

Questions that will be answered in this blog are:

  • How can I start execute System Analysis for a system?
  • Which type of systems can be analysed with System Analysis?
  • How can I use the System Analysis tool for immediate analysis of issues with a system?
  • How can I use the System Analysis tool for getting insight in the longer term trends inside a system?

System analysis

Start the system analysis function by clicking on the FIORI tile for System Analysis:

Select the system you need to analyze for issues in the scope selection screen. In the first case we take an ABAP stack with time frame of the last 6 hours:

This overview might be bit overwhelming the first time. But you can see the performance was bad in the middle of the day (see top middle graph on average response time). Bottom middle graph shows CPU of some application servers was at 100%. And at the same time there were many dumps (right middle graph). This gives a clear direction were to look for issues.

The system analysis overview adjusts the information automatically to its content. This is the information for a HANA system:

Note here that the time frame here is from the last month. This is for getting longer term overview of the system behaviour. You can get this longer term overview by changing the time frame of the system analysis tool.

Page catalog

You can select a specific view from the page catalog list on the left button bar on the screen:

So you can easily filter the specific page for the type of system you need to analyze.