System monitoring custom metric for user lock status…

From security perspective, you want to validate that 2 important users are locked in the main system clients: SAP* and DDIC.

You can create a custom monitoring metric to measure and act on this.

Creation of the custom metric for user lock status

Create a custom metric following the steps in this blog. The template to be adjusted is the technical system SAP ABAP 7.10 and higher template.

Don’t forget to tick it on for monitoring otherwise it is not active.

In expert mode create a custom metric.

Create technical name ZUSER_LOCK_STATUS:

In the data collection:

Data to enter: RFC diagnostics agent (push). User Lock status Data collector. Enter as parameters the user ID (DDIC) and the COLLECTOR_CONTEXT_ID as TECHNICAL_SYSTEM.

Set the threshold as a text threshold:

Set the red rating in case the string contains the word ‘not locked’ and set to green in case it contains the word ‘locked’.

Now assign it to Alert group for locked users:

Save the metric.

Repeat the same for SAP*.

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: