SAP Landscape Monitoring

How to Monitor SAP Environment Settings

Monitoring SAP Landscape settings can help you avoid any problems before they happen. And doing so promptly can save you time and money. According to Avantra, large SAP environments can become complex but should not be complicated to monitor.

Here is how you do it. SAP system settings can vary from one installation to the next. In this article, we’ll cover a few key settings you should monitor to keep your SAP environment running smoothly.

Common Settings to Monitor the SAP Environment

Advanced System Settings

In Control Center, navigate to the Advanced System Settings view. Under “Settings”, you can configure several key components of the SAP system. In this view, you can set up several specific settings and default values for your installation.

On top is the “Default Database Size” setting. This is a very common issue that customers encounter every day in their environments where they cannot allocate sufficient memory for their SAP database server and application server.

Database Logging

Any log messages (errors) displayed on the screen while logging into Control Center indicate problems with the database. Typically these errors are not fatal because the database can recover from them.

However, if you see a lot of them, it will take up additional CPU and I/O resources, which can be a problem for your application server performance. So you may want to monitor such errors (particularly in Syslog files).

Log File Size and Archive Logs Size

Ideally, different size sub-directories should be created on the same disk(s) and point to separate physical disks (not network share). This way, the size of these log files can grow without affecting each other.

A good practice is also to set archive logs at a smaller size as compared to ‘redo’ logs. Each of these log file size settings depends on the log group(s) assigned to that file. For example, if you have a ‘redo1’ and a ‘redo2’ log group, you should adjust the settings accordingly.

Quick Tips for Monitoring Your SAP Environment

Use an Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Solution

Use an enterprise performance management solution and set alerts on the performance of SAP workloads. This will help you know how your SAP environment is performing, whether it is experiencing any issues, and if you are experiencing any performance problems.

If you want to monitor the CPU usage of your SAP workload(s), then EPM solutions can provide real-time monitoring of the CPU usage or other important resource metrics for your SAP system.

Monitor System Statuses in RAC Environments

RAC environments should be monitored in two ways:

• Directly from the source database command line using Linux commands, and
• Using the Enterprise Manager RAC console so you can view relevant information easily.

You should also enable tracing at all levels on each node, including OS/DB/SQL. Depending on your version of Enterprise Manager, you may or may not have the option to enable tracing within the RAC Console for Oracle RAC environments.

It depends on whether you are using Enterprise Manager 12c or 12cR1 or later, as well as how you installed and configured EM.

Think About Your High Availability (HA) Strategy

It is a good idea to consider your availability strategy in your thought process when deciding which RAC solution to use and how many nodes to run. The first thing to note is that there are two types of failure scenarios: hardware and application failures. SAP is not typically prone to application failures since it relies so heavily on underlying database technology (in this case, Oracle). This means that most time and effort should be spent thinking about hardware failure scenarios as they will affect your business applications.

In extremities, they may cause downtime and performance degradation. This is where high availability strategies come into play. The solutions can help minimize downtime risk during planned or unplanned outages by leveraging a “hot standby” infrastructure with active/active topologies instead of active/passive.

Determine What Capacity Model You Will Use (Intensive Capacity vs. Non-Intensive Capacity)

If you are using the active/active topology, it depends on how much processing power you need during peak load times and what your workload is like during off-peak times.

When using an active/active topology, it is usually best to go with higher numbers of nodes in your cluster. They ensure that your peak load can succeed without a performance hit.

Conclusion

SAP is a complex system that provides many services and applications. The IT department has to ensure that all of the settings are correct so that they can work properly. These settings help you keep track of the performance and availability of your system, as well as any problems that may arise.

If you are new to monitoring SAP Environment Settings, it’s important to understand how it works and what you can do with the data you collect.

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Kyle Bartlett

Lead PHP Developer and Founder of ZF Snippets at Zf Snippets

Kyle Bartlett is a software developer and the mastermind behind ZF Snippets. With extensive expertise in PHP and a deep understanding of the Zend Framework, Kyle has dedicated his career to simplifying and enhancing the development process for web applications.