New Business Process Monitoring functionalities in SAP Solution Manager – qRFC Monitoring

Further issues of this blog

You can find an introduction to Business Process Monitoring in SAP Solution Manager in the SAP Business Process Monitoring within SAP Solution Manager of this blog. There, all further blogs dealing with various aspects of Business Process Monitoring are linked. The blog will be updated regularly.

qRFC Monitoring

Today’s blog covers the new qRFC monitoring functionality of SAP Solution Manager, which is available as of ST-A/PI 01K (February 2008).

The standard way to monitor the correctness of outbound and inbound qRFC entries would be the usage of the qRFC monitoring transactions SMQ1 (outbound queue monitor) and SMQ2 (inbound queue monitor). However, this is a manual task that must be done regularly.With SAP Solution Manager’s Business Process and Interface Monitoring you can automatize this task by monitoring the important inbound and outbound queues, to generate alerts at either backlog situations (many unprocessed queue entries) or entries in irregular status.

Background Information

Up to ST-A/PI 01K, integration of qRFC monitoring into SAP Solution Manager’s Business Process Monitoring Session was only possible using an unflexible standard CCMS content. Now, qRFCs Monitoring is completely integrated into the application monitor functionalities of SAP Solution Manager. That means: different monitoring objects (e.g. queues within different queue groups) can be handled separately, as each monitoring object can be customized with its own own selection criteria, its own data collection frequency, and its own alerting thresholds, which would not be possible using CCMS content only. In addition, there are a number of new key figures available which cover the most typical business scenarios.

The new qRFC monitor allows monitoring the qRFC processing and its individual queues for two aspects:

• qRFC Backlog Monitoring = Key figures related to the number of queue entries and their oldest age
• qRFC Status Monitoring = Key figures related to the status of queues and since when it occurred

This way you can be notified if the number of queue entries is higher than expected, the age of the oldest entry of the queue is too high as well as the combinations. 

qRFC Status Monitoring includes two different severities: Critical queue states and interim queue states. These status severity classes serve to hide the complexity of many individual status codes from the end user. Each status code has been assigned to the “critical queue states” (= immediate problem) or the “interim queue states” (= problem only if states persists too long). So you get different key figures for each severity to enable deviating alert thresholds.

Prerequisites

• SAP Solution Manager: optimally as of 4.0 with ST-SER 2008_1 and newest support package
• Satellite System: ST-A/PI 01K, for SAP BASIS 4.6C and later           

For the recommended Solution Manager Diagnostics (SMD) integration (the qRFC data collector has the ability to re-use the already collected SMD results for alerting purposes; but there is also the possibility to directly select the needed key figures from the database):

• ST-PI release 2005_1 for Basis release 6.20 or later

• ST-PI minimum support package level depending on Basis release

In case those prerequisites are not met, there are also other possibilities to setup qRFC monitoring for your systems. See the Setup Guide Interface Monitoring for details.

Setup in SAP Solution Manager

The setup is as easy as for the IDoc Monitor (presented in the New Business Process Monitoring functionalities in SAP Solution Manager – ALE / IDoc Monitoring). Starting point is the definition of qRFC monitoring objects. You can choose between key figures for status and backlog monitoring:

Status Monitoring

•          Number of entries with critical status in group

•          Age of oldest critical status in group

•          Combination of “Entries” and “Age” in critical state

•          Number of entries with interim status in group

•          Age of oldest interim status in group

•          Combination of “Entries” and “Age” in interim status

Backlog monitoring

•          Number of individual queues in group

•          Total number of entries in all queues of group

•          Average number of entries per queue in group

•          Maximum number of entries per queue in group

•          Age of oldest entry in group

•          Combination of “Total entries” and “Oldest age”

Usually it is not necessary to include all the key figures. Choose those that bring the most meaningful information to monitor your business processes and are most adequate for defining thresholds.

In addition, the queues to be monitored have to be specified with the following customizing options:

•          qRFC direction (inbound or outbound)

•          RFC destination (for outbound calls only)

•          Queue group (= prefix to group queues with similar names)

•          Command string of SMD qRFC backlog collection

•          Command string of SMD qRFC status collection

On key figure level, thresholds for each selected key figure have to be defined:

In the Business Process Monitoring Session the measured and – according to your customizing – rated values are listed. You can use the ‘Detail info’ button to navigate into the monitored system: This automatically chooses the right monitor for either outbound (SMQ1) or inbound (SMQ2) qRFCs according to your customized parameter. Furthermore, the queue group and the destination are used for selection, and in case of a status key figure also the SMQ1/SMQ2 option ‘Waiting Queues Only’.

Next Blog

In the next issue of this blog, we will deal with the topic Data Consistency Monitoring (as already announced in the first blog). The blog will be available next week.