ST06N/OS06N/OS07N - A new era for OS collectors

JimSpath · ‎10-13-2007

At their booth at TechEd 07 in Las Vegas, IBM demoed updated transactions for Basis and other SAP experts to view the underlying hardware performance of a virtualized environment, as well as the totally cool transfer of a live running SAP system and database from one node to another, without user session interruption. The system was running in Walldorf, and the control/display was in Nevada, USA!

ST06/OS06 is the local operating system monitor, where you view the CPU, memory and other metrics collected by an SAP software agent (saposcol) on an immediate or short history period. One of my mandates in visiting TechEd this year was to get ideas for better solutions to the collection, storage and use of this data in both long term capacity planning scenarios as well as immediate escalation issues. See my ST10 blogfor an example of where we need this capability.

The problem with the "old" ST06 is that it uses granular system resources that don't exist any longer in a virtualized environment, so if I see 90% CPU usage that might not be a bad thing.

The screens we saw were for SAP 7.0, so my next challenge will be how to connect our older systems via agents to a newer system (maybe Solution Manager 4.0) to provide this information before we upgrade.

SDN forum:

I found one SDN forum Virtualization on AIX 5.3 and above with SAP on the topic of OS metrics in virtualized environments.

Miscellany:

OS07N ST06N OS06N, all lead to the same target.
Details are described in the SAP note 994025.
Agents to monitor older SAP versions are available down to 4.6 D kernel based systems. 
The central display needs to run on an 7.0 based system [correction: central display can run on systems 6.20, 6.40 or 7.0 based, as described in Note 
994025]

Notes of interest:

994025 Improvements in monitoring virtualized OS environments
1013331 CCMS agents and kernel: Patches 2007
1019567 Corrections for new operating system monitor
1084019 OS07N: New operating system monitor

And, aPDF document entitled "Operating System Monitor" - release 716.

Screen shots and research into our systems:

The newest SAP installation we are running is Solution Manager 4.0, so I used this to try to find the transactions as shown. Alas, while we have a 7.00 system, we are not up to the patch levels required in the Basis, kernel and agent versions. We are on PL 10, and need to be on PL26!?

However, there are notable differences from our 6.20/6.40 systems. The most obvious is the change from flat screen displays to ALV grids. Less useful is that we are missing some of the column titles, and one appears to be in German ("stunde"). Time to patch!