System monitoring is a basic and critical need to ensure the availability and health of systems. Currently, it is a realty that many customers are using the SAP Business Technology platform to host their services and, likewise, there is a need to track the status of these. SAP Cloud ALM is the new solution offered by SAP to carry out the monitoring of our services hosted on SAP BTP.
At a general level, SAP Cloud ALM is an app lifecycle management solution that provides features for both the implementation and operation of Cloud solutions, also enabling operation in on-Premise systems.
Within SAP Cloud ALM for operations we have different scenarios depending on the type of monitoring we need. In this article, we will focus on two of them oriented to SAP Integration Suite – Cloud Integration; Health Monitoring and Integration & Exception Monitoring.
Health Monitoring for SAP Integration Suite
In this scenario, the health of the monitored cloud services and technical systems can be checked. Metrics are collected periodically and can be used to calculate the overall condition of the supervised service. The monitored metrics are defined by the service itself and can differ for each type of service.
Features
Overview: In the overview screen, you can see the current status of all cloud services or technical systems that are connected to Health Monitoring. The overall status is calculated based on the number of metrics in warning or critical status.
Monitoring: Metric details for each monitored object can be displayed when selected on the overview page, where you will see a list of components and metrics. Each component and metric is represented by a box summarising the current value and rating. By clicking on a box, you will get more details on all included metrics.
Analytics: For each metric it is possible to display the historical values of the metric. Here you can identify trends or investigate when a specific resource shortage has occurred.
Dashboards and content
In the following image you can see the main Health Monitoring dashboard with the different types of monitored services.
One of the services is a SAP Integration Suite; in the following image we can see the specific Integration Suite dashboard.
These are the components that can be monitored:
You can access the detail of each metric and view the history of the values of this through graphs.
Configuration
The configuration of the scenario is done through the creation of an Endpoint that will depend on whether the scenario is Cloud Foundry or Neo.
Integration & Exception Monitoring for Integration Suite.
The Integration & Exception Monitoring scenario provides transparency for data exchange processes. It supports monitoring of point-to-point interfaces as well as interfaces that use orchestration platforms, and provides a unified user experience for all interface types through a common interface and usability.
This scenario provides the following functionalities:
- Message monitoring
- Message search (tracking)
- Alerts on failed messages or exceptions.
Features
Monitoring: Monitoring provides a detailed status overview per business system (not available in beta) and/or cloud components on inbound/outbound messages for the different interfaces. Components can be organised into scenarios to describe message flow paths between them. By drilling down into individual messages, customers can check individual problems and message details.
Alerting: Based on the collected data, alerts can be defined for specific error situations, for example, messages in ERROR status on a specific component or in a specific scenario. The generated alerts are collected in the alerting inbox. To analyse the alert, the user can drill down into the alert details to get information about the details of the related message. In the alert inbox, actions such as assigning a processor, adding comments, postponing or confirming an alert can be performed.
Tracking: Tracking allows users to search and track individual messages based on specific context (business) attributes, such as the order number, the employee ID or similar context attributes.
Dashboard and content
The following table shows the content available for SAP Integration Suite -Cloud Integration:
Configuration
Before starting the configuration in SAP Integration Suite – Cloud Integration, certain information about the SAP Cloud Integration tenant (Operating Platform, IdP) must be collected.
Depending on whether the environment is Neo or Cloud Foundry, the configuration will have to be done in different ways.
Cloud ALM as a monitoring solution
From our point of view, and based on the experience acquired testing SAP Cloud ALM, it is a tool with a modern look and feel, as we have become used to recently with SAP, and with a high level of usability and with an amazing ease of configuration, close to plug&play. The scenarios come pre-configured (a trend in the Cloud world) and the configuration, compared to other competitors, is really simple.
In future articles we will focus on other SAP Cloud ALM scenarios.
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