A while ago (years in fact), I took an SAP class in system administering monitoring. After the course, I practiced setting up a central monitoring instance, hooked up a few agents, and let it run. Back burner projects sometime simmer, sometimes bubble over, and sometimes the pilot light goes out. In this case, the pot went stone cold, as our Solution Manager instance was installed as version 7, and no development system was ready for available as a playground for experimenting.
Stories of then:
- jim.spath/blog/2008/06/03/an-old-dog-tries-new-tricks--ccms-ii-adm107--addendum-2-cph-02-jun-2008
- An old dog tries new tricks - CCMS II / ADM107 - Addendum 1
- An old dog learning new tricks - SAP education course ADM107 - Day 2 (of 2)
- An old dog learning new tricks - SAP education course ADM107 - Day 1 (of 2)
Now
Fast forward to the present. A Solution Manager development system is up and running, with production being the source of a restore. We're still sorting out the connectivity and stability, but it's to the point where I can get back to building out a central monitoring platform. The full scope is yet to be determined, given the real possibility that the front burner will be taken over by any number of higher priority projects.
Realizing that the course book is now dated, I found this reference the most helpful to get started again:
Configuring the BI Integration of CPH and Statistics Data
As usual, reality can be slightly distorted from the fantasy of an instruction manual. There are nine steps listed, in fairly good detail, while the most important step (wading through the activation process) is omitted entirely. Fortunately, I enlisted an experienced BW administrator to work with me to understand the meaning of the pop-up messages that occurred.
Example "are you sure" message:
A few stray notes
- We stuck with the RFC connections and CCMS agents that are running now, understanding that both will need review, patching and validation. As this is just a practice run for production, if anything breaks we'll do over.
- One of the remote systems talked to Solution Manager, the other didn't. One is enough to prove data collection works.
- One agent is "patch collection 2009/1, OSS note 1304480" - pretty recent; probably not the newest.
- First activation log message: STEP ACTIVATE_DS_SRC started ( 07/08/2010 14:30:28 )
- Last message: STEP CREATE_PROCESS_CHAIN end ( 07/08/2010 14:54:38 )
- We ignored this: "InfoPackage ->0CCMS_CPH_DATA_DELTA_ONLY(ZPAK_4I...( already exists in process chains"
- Final, happy, message: "You have activated the CCMS Content in the BI, and have - if you have scheduled the process chains directly - ensured that the loading of the data has been started"
Further documentation
To keep the blog from being another "instruction manual" I decided to put the screen shots of running CCMSBISETUP in the SCN wiki. A search of the wiki showed only one place it was mentioned, so I added content under the "Solution Manager Setup" space. If you look, you'll also find a "Solution Manager" wiki space.
- Central Performance History with BI
- CPH - Running CCMS BI Setup
- CPH - Querying CCMS BI
- CPH - Verifying CCMS BI Load
You'll notice that the last section is incomplete, as we are missing a couple elements needed for web access. I'm nearly certain we'll get this running in short order, so I can move on to replacing manual data collections with automated streams. I won't pretend I'm looking forward to moving queries from simple spreadsheets to a BW engine, nor trusting that the data transfers will simply keep working without periodic health reviews.
Lastly, another image (also from the wiki):
UPDATE:
What happened next? - See "Return to Central Performance History, Even Shorter Hiatus"
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