Due to the criticality of SAP environments, the monitoring of these systems has always been a priority within IT operations. Traditionally, this monitoring has been satisfactorily resolved with generalist tools that included SAP modules or by complementing them with more specific tools such as Solution Manager or Focused Run.
Although these types of tools have worked well in the OnPremise world, the current trend towards the Cloud world is also affecting SAP Solutions, with more and more customers using IaaS Cloud platforms to deploy their SAP systems.
In these environments, traditional tools, although compatible, have some disadvantages, such as the complexity of connectivity, increased costs due to having to deploy additional machines or higher network traffic.
For SAP environments deployed in the Cloud, the logical thing to do would be to have native Cloud tools that integrate with the tools already available for IaaS monitoring, being able to monitor their entire stack in a single point.
In this article, we are going to present the solution offered by GCP to monitor SAP systems based entirely on stackdriver, which in addition to offering a series of metrics out of the box, allows us to implement our own metrics. In this way, we can integrate SAP metrics into the GCP global monitoring dashboards. Furthermore, following the Google multicloud philosophy, these tools will probably evolve to systems deployed in GCP and will even be used for other Cloud providers or even for OnPrenise systems, which could lead to a reduction in licensing costs if we replace our traditional tools with the new options offered by GC.
Google Cloud and SAP have jointly developed a monitoring agent for SAP HANA, which is included in a development roadmap, so it will be improved over time with new features. This agent is able to collect custom metrics from the HANA instance and send them to the Google monitoring console (Cloud Monitoring).
The agent consists of a configuration file where we can indicate the connection parameters and the metrics collection method. By default, the agent will collect a set of metrics defined from the SAP HANA database.
You can find more information about the default metrics that the agent collects in the following link:
https://cloud.google.com/solutions/sap/docs/sap-hana-default-metrics
In addition, we can configure YAML files with SQL queries to define our own custom metrics.
In the following image you can see an example of a custom metric defined to show the physical and virtual memory usage of a HANA database:
From the monitoring console we can create dashboards to display graphs of our metrics that can be filtered by different time intervals.
Cloud Monitoring allows to configure alerts based on the thresholds you define for the metrics, so that you can send, for example, an email or SMS to a support team to resolve a problem.
All notification channels are configurable from the Google Cloud monitoring console.
Another very useful feature of Google Cloud Monitoring is the Uptime Checks, an instance that we send to a resource (such as a SAP HANA instance or any of SAP NW) and check if we get an answer. With this we can determine the availability of an instance, a URL, a service or even an AWS load balancer.
Related to this checking, we can create an alerting policy to create an incident when the request fails. As with the agent, the policy can be configured to notify by email, SMS or any notification channel; including relevant information about the resource or the resolution procedure.
The following shows the “Uptime Checks” console with an example of an availability check of a HANA instance attacking the “indexserver” port.
Another need when trying to monitor a SAP HANA system is the use of the filesystem. Knowing whether the HANA data or the HANA log is full is necessary if we want to ensure the availability of our environment.
For this purpose, Google has developed a global monitoring agent, Cloud Monitoring Agent.
This agent is based on the “collectd Daemon” which collects system metrics from Google instances to send them to the Google monitoring console.
The following graph shows an example of a metric configured with the Cloud Monitoring Agent to show the usage of the filesystems:
On these metrics, we can configure an alerting policy. In the following graph we can see an alert configured to notify in the event that the filesystem usage threshold exceeds 85%.
Moreover, this agent is able to monitor metrics such as disk, CPU, network traffic and other metrics that you can see in the following link:
https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/api/metrics_agent
Google provides us with a mobile app of the Cloud console in which we can manage the incidents caused by the alerts configured in the agents. From this app we can confirm and resolve incidents without having to turn on our computer. This app is available both in Google Play and in the App Store.
In short, today Google Cloud has a very complete infrastructure, which is in continuous development and evolution, to ensure the availability of our SAP environment by offering simple and efficient functionalities to be able to react to the incidents generated by our SAP environments.
We can help you to check and monitorize your SAP system on Google Cloud or other cloud systems. We can talk