Category: System monitoring

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.

Guided procedure for system health check ABAP…

SAP Focused Run has a guided procedure to quickly check the system health of an ABAP system.

Questions that will be answered in this blog are:

  • How to run the guided procedure for ABAP health check?
  • When to run the guided procedure for ABAP health check?

Running the ABAP health check guided procedure

To start the guided procedure for system health check, open the Guided Procedures FIORI tile:

Now select from the guided procedure for advanced system monitoring the System health check for ABAP systems:

Select the Plus icon to execute a new guided procedure:

Add the scope of systems to the guided procedure:

Then press the Execute Manually button to start.

The guided road map will now open:

Select the checks and press Perform to execute the checks. After the checks are done, you can zoom in the detailed results:

The next checks are shown below:

When to run this ABAP system health check guided procedure?

The ABAP system health check guided procedure can be run:

  1. In case of reported system issues with performance: to quickly find potential root cause
  2. For example monthly or quarterly to check how system is doing

You can also automate the guided procedure and run it on scheduled basis and mail the results to you. This you can for example setup for your primary ECC production system on daily basis. For the instruction of automation, read this dedicated blog.

Batch job monitoring overview SAP Focused Run 3.0…

Batch job monitoring is a powerful part of SAP Focused Run system monitoring.

This blog will give you the overview of functions of batch job monitoring.

For setup of the batch job monitoring, you can read all details in this blog.

Questions that will be answered are:

  • How does SAP Focused Run job monitoring work?
  • What can I alert on?
  • Is maintenance needed for batch job monitoring?

Batch monitoring overview

For batch job monitoring start the Job Monitoring FIORI tile:

The batch job monitoring overview screen opens now:

You can now zoom into the job errors per system:

And you can zoom in per job now:

Go back to the previous screen to click on the alert generated:

During the setup of batch job monitoring (see this blog), you make the settings on alerting and who to inform when a batch job fails.

In the settings of batch job monitoring you can alert per job on:

  • Job cancellation
  • Job start delay
  • Job run time
  • Message codes in the job log

Maintenance

Maintenance on Job monitoring is required. In the initial setup the SM37 job schedule is read. But you still need to perform maintenance:

  • Jobs that no longer run need to be removed
  • Changed job behavior (for example run time length)
  • New jobs (these you need to add)
  • New insights into job criticality and more points to monitor (you typically start with cancelled jobs only, later you learn and fine tune per job)
  • Receivers of alerts change over time

For maintenance, you can open the batch job configuration screen and with the icons on the right see the alerts for changed or deleted jobs:

Reference

The full setup guide for batch job monitoring can be downloaded from the SAP Focused Run expert portal via this link.

SAP Focused Run Rule Based Template Assignment…

Introduction

When we perform Simple System Integration (SSI) on a managed system , it automatically activates the SAP default monitoring template on the managed system. However, in most of the SAP Focused Run (FRUN) implementation scenarios, we create customer defined monitoring templates (Custom Templates), which we then manually assign/activate on the managed system.

Rule Based Template Assignment is a feature in FRUN by which we can define based on managed system category which custom monitoring template to be assigned and activated directly when we perform SSI on the managed system.

Defining Rule Based Template Assignment

For Rule Based Template Assignment navigate to the FIORI tile Individual Maintenance in the Advanced System Management section of FIORI launch-pad.

In the Individual Maintenance App navigate to the Rule Maintenance by clicking on the button as shown below.

In the Rule Rule Based Assignment Screen, on the left hand side panel, select the specific Managed Object type for which you want to define the Rule Based Template Assignment.

In this blog we take the example of defining a Rule Based Template Assignment for managed system of type SAP ABAP BASIS 7.10 and higher and specify the custom template for System Level monitoring template. So we select Technical Systems upon which the right side panel now gives a list of all product types. In the right side panel we scroll down and select SAP ABAP BASIS 7.10 and higher.

Now we need to define the Rule based on which the Custom Defined Template to be defined. In this blog we take the example that we have defined 2 custom templates one for Production Systems and one for Non Production Systems. So we will need to define rule to assign template based on filters System Type ABAP and IT Admin role defined in LMDB. For more information on this function read this blog.

In the subsequent screen select Maintain Rules.

In the Maintain Rule screen we select the following filters.

Name your Rule and Save.

Similarly you can create Rule ABAP Non production, just ensure to select the following IT Admin Roles.

Now back in the main screen select the Rule you created from the drop down.

And for Template select the custom template you want to select for the assignment.

Add the assignment.

Now click in Continue with Next Step button till you come to the Reconfiguration tab and then close. This will allow you to save your Rule Assignment.

Once you have assigned the ABAP Production and ABAP Non production rules in the main screen you will see the following assignments listed.

After the assignments done, the next time SSI performed on any ABAP system will take up the custom monitoring template as defined in these rules.

In Individual Maintenance system list you can also see whether current assignment is SAP default or Rule Based Template Assignment.

Batch job monitoring setup Focused Run 3.0…

This blog will explain how to setup batch job monitoring in SAP Focused Run 3.0. If you are using SAP Focused Run 4.0: read this blog on batch job monitoring setup in Focused Run 4.0.

The usage of batch job monitoring is explained in the overview blog for batch job monitoring.

Questions that will be answered are:

  • How to setup batch job monitoring?
  • Can I monitor batch job start delay?
  • Can I monitor batch job duration?
  • Can I monitor if specific error messages occurred in the job log?
  • Can I alert on batch jobs?
  • Can I notify on batch jobs errors by sending mails?

Batch job monitoring setup

To setup batch job monitoring start the Batch job monitoring FIORI tile:

On the top right now open the configuration screen by clicking on the wheel icon:

The batch job groups now open. Select the pencil icon to change:

In the next screen press the New button to add a new Job group:

A batch job group can be set up in many ways:
1. You define one group for each system.
2. You define a group per functionality that crosses multiple systems.
3. Combination of the above. For example all technical jobs are clustered.
Think twice carefully on this setup before you start to implement. Changing between the concepts can be costing a lot of work.

Give the new group a name:

Give the new job group a good description and add the systems:

Save the definition.

First goto the third tab to make the default job settings:

The default job settings will be applied to any job added to the group. You can still fine tune per job later on. It is best to start with job status monitoring first. And only switch on the more advanced options later on for specific jobs only.

Save your settings again.

Now go to the jobs tab and press the add button to add new jobs:

In the selection screen that pops up now, it is very important to first select the system you want to read the jobs from, and then press go:

Focused run will now read the jobs from the remote system. In the list, select the jobs you want to monitor. You can select them mass as well. Then press ok.

Save your work.

The selected jobs are actively monitored now.

The jobs need to run first before they are visible in the batch job monitoring overview screen. Especially for the weekly and monthly running jobs.

Fine tuning the job monitoring: job errors

Fine tuning of the job monitoring can be done on the monitoring rules tab. First select the job to fine tune:

Now you can start to make deviations from the default.

In the example above the job duration monitoring was activated. Note here that you should set 2 thresholds: 1 for yellow and 1 for red.

The third option is job activity: this you switch on for jobs you need to have running at a certain frequently.

The fourth option is the job delay: some job really must be started in time without delay. Indicate here after which time an alert should be generated if the job does not start in time.

The last option is to check the job log messages. Here you can check for messages in the job log. Usage example: a job might have finished technically correct, so the job cancellation is not triggered. But inside the job log a functional error might occur. This error code you can pickup here and trigger an alert in the job monitoring.

Fine tuning the job monitoring: alerting

In the second block you can fine tune the alerting per job:

You can choose here to automatically confirm the alert if the system detects that the next batch job run went ok.

The other important fine tuning possible here is decide how many job failures in a sequence are needed before the alert is raised. For example, you have a job that runs every 10 minutes, but on average fails twice per day and is normally corrected the next run. In this case you can set the Relevant job instance counter to 2. This way 2 failed jobs in a row will alert. If it is recovered after a single wrong run there is no alert generated (here you must also fine tune the data collection frequency).

In the alert notification section you can assign an alert notification variant (this holds the mail template and receivers). In the default setup, you normally set the notification towards the basis team. But for some job(s) you might also want to notify a functional or business team.

Reference

The full setup guide for batch job monitoring can be downloaded from the SAP Focused Run expert portal via this link.

System down monitor…

A special function is System Monitoring is the System Down Monitor. This overview directly gives an overview of the systems that are considered down by SAP Focused Run and the systems which are set to having maintenance.

Questions that will be answered in this blog are:

  • How can I quickly get an overview of all my systems that are down?

System down monitoring

In the system monitoring screen select the System Down monitoring icon on the left icon bar (here indicated with the arrow):

You can see systems that are down and which ones that are having planned maintenance. If you have set up the SLA management, it will also show that aspect.

If you want to zoom in on the issues, press the i icon right of the system. Then select Links to go to the respective tool for further investigation:

For systems down the best tools are usually the System Analysis and the Alert Event management.

Changing settings

You can change the layout settings with the glasses icon:

You can show/hide the SLA and charts section as per your need.

Definition of down

The definition of down is in Focused Run: any red alert in the availability metrics. This can be:

  • Complete system down
  • One of the application servers is down
  • Core function is down (for example ABAP stack is up and running, but the Https is not available)
  • Important subfunctions are not working (for example in the SLT system 1 or more source systems can not be reached)

Create custom metric for system monitoring…

In some cases you want to have your own metric defined to fine tuning the system monitoring template.

Questions that will be answered in this blog are:

  • How do I create a custom monitoring metric?
  • Do I need to re-create the custom metric per monitoring template?
  • What are examples of custom metrics?

Creating custom metric

In this example we create a custom metric to make sure that the user WF-BATCH is not locked.

There is already a metric in the ABAP template that is called User Lock Status. This can be used as a basis for our custom metric.

Goto your template into change mode and on top left choose Create (you need to be in Expert mode first):

And select Metric. Now the screen opens for a new metric creation:

Fill out the details, and create a custom description:

Now go to the tab Data Collection:

Copy the data from your reference metric here. Don’t forget to fill out the Parameter Value. In this case WF-BATCH. Also make sure you have a reasonable Collection Interval timing. Not everything is need to be collected every 5 minutes.

Now go to the tab Threshold:

Configure your threshold setting.

Now press the Next button and assign the metric to the correct group:

Now press Finish to save the metric.

The new custom metric is now available in the monitoring template:

You see that this one has the Custom created marked. Later you can use the filter on Custom created column to quickly find it again.

Deploying custom metric to other templates

If you have to deploy the custom metric to other templates: so far this is a manual action. Per template you have to re-create the same custom metric. I have not found a nice way of re-using custom metrics yet.

Examples of custom metrics

Examples of custom metrics:

Fine tuning monitoring templates…

This blog explains about fine tuning of the monitoring templates.

Questions that will be answered are:

  • How to update the SAP content for templates?
  • What is a good rule of thumb for the amount of templates to create and maintain?
  • Should I transport the templates or maintain them locally?
  • How to create your own template?
  • How to fine tune a single metric?
  • How to change the alerting settings of a metric?
  • How to assign the template to a system?
  • How to update the template of a system?

SAP content updates

As a starting point you use the SAP pre-delivered content. Also the SAP content gets updated. OSS note 2695734 – Manual Content Update for FRUNCONT200 in Focused Run 2.0 for SAP Solution Manager (FRUN-CONT) is keeping track of the updates. It also explains where to download the content files. For version 3.0 take OSS note 2991255 – Manual content update for FRUN-CONT 300 in SAP Focused Run (FRUN-CONT). And for 4.0 OSS note 3275006 – Manual content update for FRUN-CONT 400 in SAP Focused Run.

Use program RCSU_MANUAL_UPLOAD to upload the downloaded content. Then use the FIORI tile Content management to activate the new content:

And update the content or see it is already up-to-date:

Before you start fine tuning your own templates, make sure the standard SAP content is up-to-date.

Amount of templates to fine tune

In principle it is up to you to generate as much templates as needed. Initially it seems a good idea to have many different templates. The setback is that fine tuning a specific metric that is valid for all templates, you need to repeat this action. Also when you have fine tuned a template, you need to update the attached systems.

A good starting point for fine tuning is to have 2 templates to start with:

  1. Template for productive system
  2. Template for non-productive system

The template for productive system can have more metrics activated with sharper thresholds for generating alerts.

The main goal for a non-productive template can be focused on system availability only.

For productive system you want to manage all aspects of a system including performance and all content exceptions.

Local maintenance or transport

The template maintenance can be done on a productive Focused Run system directly. Or you can choose to maintain the templates on a trial/test Focused Run system, test it there, and then transport it to the productive Focused Run system. The transport is the best approach that gives the most control.

Who should fine tune a template?

This is an organisational question. If you let everybody maintain the templates and metric content of the templates, you will quickly loose control. Best to limit the amount of people to maintain the template settings. Be careful when handing out template control to a service provider. They tend to change the thresholds to very high levels, so they get less alerts. In stead of solving the alerts….

Creation of own template

Open the template maintenance FIORI tile:

Select the template you want to fine tune. In this example we will fine tune the Technical System template for ABAP 7.10 and higher:

Press the Edit button and then the button Create Custom Template:

Give the template a good name. The most descriptive text must be at the beginning.

Fine tuning the template

Case 1: include or exclude in monitoring

Goto the metrics tab:

In the system monitoring you can switch on or off metrics. Press save after each change to save your setting changes.

Case 2: fine tune data selection

In the standard SAP delivery there is an alert for Number of long running Dialog Work Processes. Goto the Expert mode (button top rights), then select the tab data collection:

Go into edit mode via the Change Settings button, and you can update the field value in parameter value for WP_MIN_RUNTIME to your needs.

This is just an example. You can fine tune a lot of metrics in this way.

Case 3: fine tune threshold and alert settings

If you want to change the thresholds, first click on the expert mode button on the top right corner. Then press the Change setting button to edit the Threshold tab settings:

In this example we changed the type from Numeric (green/red) to Numeric (green/yellow/red) and we changed the values. The modified column indicates that we have changed a metric and that the definition is different from the standard SAP one.

On the Alerts tab you can make changes to the alert settings:

You can change the following:

  • If an alert is to be generated or not (Active means, alert is generated)
  • Severity of the alert
  • If an alert will be automatically confirmed when the system detects that the issue is solved
  • If an automatic notification will be send or not (see this blog to set up mail notification)

The usage of alerts, will be explained in this blog.

The configuration of automatic notifications is explained in this blog.

In the last tab Managed Objects you can see there are no systems assigned yet to the newly created template.

Assigning custom template to a system

To assign a new custom template to a system, goto the Individual maintenance FIORI tile:

Select the system and press the button Change assignment and assign the wanted new template:

Now press the button Reconfigure to effectuate the template change.

Automation of template assignments can be configured as well by using rules. This is explained in this blog.

Template updates

If you have systems assigned to a template, and you have executed template changes, goto the tab Managed objects in the template maintenance screen:

Select the systems and press the Apply and Activate button. The system will apply the updated template now.

If you use transport mechanism for template updates: after transport import, you need to go to the updated templates, and still to the update assignment. This is not automatically done after the transport.

Compare templates

In the main screen of template maintenance you can select the button Compare to start the template comparison app. Select the templates to compare:

You now see the delta’s between the templates:

Creating custom metrics

Creation of custom metrics is possible. Read more about it in this blog.

The setback of custom metric is that it needs to be created each time for each template. This is another reason to keep the amount of custom templates as low as possible.

System monitoring usability tips and tricks…

This blog will give tips and tricks on the usability of System monitoring.

Questions that will be answered are:

  • How to optimize the scope selection?
  • How to use the tabular view?
  • How to check a specific metric across multiple systems?

Optimizing scope selection

In the scope selection of systems, you can create a few variants to speed up your work.

In this example we will setup a variant to quickly select all productive systems. In the scope selection block select the IT Admin Role for Productive System (setting the IT admin role is described in this blog):

Now select the down arrow next to Standard in the top left corner and select Save As:

You can choose to set this variant as default. Setting it as public will make the variant available for all users. Selecting the Apply Automatically tickbox will apply this specific variant immediately. This might be preferable, or annoying. Just try it.

Upon pressing Save you will get a request for transport popup or save it as local request.

You can also create a similar view for non-production systems.

In the end you can always press the Manage button to change the variants and texts:

Now you can easily switch between scopes for production and non-production:

Using the tabular view

In stead of using the hierarchy view, you can also switch to the Tabular View:

In this view you can for example sort the items on a column like the traffic light:

Or you can apply a text filter to search for a specific metric:

Checking a metric across multiple systems

If you have an issue in one system, you might want to quickly validate if you have similar issue in different systems, or you simple want to compare with different systems. From the monitoring of a system select the metric.

For this example we selected Short Dumps:

Select the i button to get the explanation text:

This gives the exact name:

Now goto the metric tool:

If you don’t see the correct metric, use the metric selection filter on the top right of the screen:

Press Apply, and you get the overview of this specific metric across all systems in your selected scope:

Storing metric data longer

Focused Run normally stores the data 28 days. If you need the data for specific metrics and systems longer, you can make use of the aggregation framework. Read the details in this blog.

System monitoring overview…

This blog will give you and overview of the functional capabilities of the System Monitoring in SAP Focused Run.

Questions that will be answered in this blog are:

  • What are the main functions of System Monitoring?
  • How to zoom in on systems and specific metrics?

System monitoring

From the Advanced System monitoring group in FIORI launchpad, select the System Monitoring tile:

Now select the systems you want the see the monitoring data about in the Scope selection block (for usability tips and tricks read this blog):

Select Go when you finished your filtering. You now reach the overview screen:

If you want to zoom in click on one of the numbers, or select the Systems button from the left hand toolbar:

The traffic lights indicate where the issue or issues are: availability, performance, configuration or exceptions. If you want to go directly to an alert click on the alert number. More on alerts in this blog.

Click on a single system in the left column to open the system monitoring view for a single system:

On the left hand side, you can see the application (in this case ABAP) on top. You can also see the database (HANA) and application server, CI and their hosts. On the right hand side in a tree structure you can see the diverse checkpoints and issues in the system. The checkpoints are called metrics and they are clubbed together into logical blocks (like system exceptions, performance, availability). In this case there is a system exception due to too many short dumps today.

You can open the graph for this metric to see the details in time:

By clicking on the start and to date, you can select the date/time range or use the Select Time Frame button for a predefined time range:

Summary

The overview above gives the top – down approach in full: from the total landscape, to single system, to group of metrics to single metric.

For more System Monitoring usability tips & tricks, read this dedicated blog.

Guidelines for fine-tuning and tweaking the alert metrics via templates are explained in this blog.

A special type of monitor is the System Down monitor, which focuses on availability of systems. Read more in this dedicated blog.