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TomCenens
Active Contributor

Hello SDN Community

What is the SAP Hostagent ?

Th SAP Host Agent is a prerequisite to install Solution Manager diagnostics agent 7.11 and higher. It is installed once per physical server.

The SAP Host Agent is also automatically installed when you perform a SAP Netweaver 7.0 EhP 2 installation. It is used for Adaptive Computing Controller (ACC) which is used to manage SAP components.

Be sure to check what ACC can do as it’s an interesting topic and information is available on SDN:
Adaptive Computing

Troubleshooting after installation

After installing the hostagent for my diagnostics agents I bumped into errors in the log files concerning saposcol. The SAP OS Collector (saposcol) collects OS data (cpu, memory etc) which can be viewed through transaction OS06 or ST06 in a regular Abap based SAP system. For diagnostics, data is read from saposcol for Wily Introscope.

SAPOSCOL service

The saposcol should run as a service of the saphost_exec process. Because I installed the SAP Host Agent using the available diagnostics agent standalone DVD’s I had an already older version of the SAP Host Agent.

 

To enable saposcol to run as a service you need to make sure it is mentioned at the end of the service/porttypes variable in the file /usr/sap/hostctrl/exe/host_profile (unix example)

service/porttypes = SAPHostControl NwaManagement SAPCCMS SAPOscol

Now once you have adjusted the host_profile file,  restart the Host Agent using the saphost_exec –restart command.

Gettings things working

First thing to do is updating the SAP Host Agent to avoid as much issues as possible. I installed 7.11 version since it matches the diagnostics agents 7.11 version. You can find the package on SAP Service Marketplace under SAP Technology Components under support packages & downloads.

 

According to the guide you update by putting the extracted files from the SAR file in a temporary directory and calling saphostexec –upgrade (as root for unix).

 

You download the latest SAR file (currently named SAPHOSTAGENT) into a temporary directory on your server, you unpack it.

 

You stop the currently active SAP Host Agent using the saphostexec -stop command.

 

You go to the temporary directory and use the command saphostexec -upgrade (the saphostexec that is in your temporary directory). That concludes upgrading the SAP Host Agent.

If you now check your processes, you should see a process running named saposcol under /usr/sap/hostctrl/exe. In your managed SAP system (abap stack based) you should also be able to get the status of saposcol.

 

For diagnostics, you have to stop/start each SMD Agent residing on the host to enable them to capture data from the saposcol service running under the SAP host agent.

Incorrect saposcol restart

There is also a SAP note to prevent the wrong saposcol from starting up when you restart using transaction ST06:
Note 1408697 - ST06 triggers incorrect saposcol restart

If your managed SAP systems isn’t yet on the support package level stated in the SAP note, implement it.

Kind regards

Tom