Solution Manager 7.1 monitoring content update

I encountered a problem where the diagnostics agents self-monitoring was not reporting into the technical monitoring alert inbox.

picture 1.0

picture 1.1

After you have set up the monitoring in Solution Manager and the Solution Manager self-monitoring is active, alerts should be pushed into the Technical Monitoring alert inbox when an agent becomes unavailable.

If it works properly you would get an alert as shown in picture 1.0. If you select the alert and open up the alert details (see picture 1.1) then you should get the details on the agents that are connected to Solution Manager and which of those has been down and is down at the moment.

What was I getting? Nothing at all. I could see in the agent framework that an agent would be down and I could even see in the self monitoring in Solution Manager that an agent would be down but no alerts where being triggered. The solution apparently was updating the monitoring content in Solution Manager 7.1 and then rerun the configuration for self monitoring after applying the content update.

There are some interesting particular things about the monitoring content update and because of that I decided to post this blog.

Updating the monitoring content

picture 1.2

GO to transaction SOLMAN_SETUP and choose Technical Monitoring in the left side menu. Next choose the System Monitoring option button under Technical Monitoring (see picture 1.2).

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Go to setup step 2.8 Update Content (see picture 1.3)

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Note the icon under Source of Import on picture 1.4. This icon implies that the content was delivered through a transport request (in this case most likely the application of SPS04).

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Now go into edit mode (see picture 1.5)

picture 1.6

Click on Import Content (see picture 1.6)

picture 1.7

If you have a Solution Manager that has the same content version installed as mentioned in the message box please ignore that fact and press Yes (see picture 1.7). I hope I’m not the only person to whom this sounds strange and not logical but apparently differences can exist between Content-Version 7 and Content-Version 7 (notice the date uploaded by SAP at in picture 1.6).

picture 1.8

Here we go again, confusion, once the content is imported it is not yet applied however, when you look at the table you see Applied (see picture 1.8) but that’s the applying of the content on the date stated under When Applied so in fact the newly downloaded templates are not applied. Try to stick with me on this one, although the content is not yet applied, the mere import of content can fix problems! Yes! That’s so strange right? Hell yes but it’s a challenge to work like this right!

picture 1.9

picture 2.0

So now you still have to apply the new content. The Apply button offers two options, Apply Directly and Apply with Analysis (see picture 1.9). Apply with Analysis will basically give you a screenshot of the templates that will be removed and the templates that are being added (see picture 2.0) while Apply Directly will just apply the content.

picture 2.1

After applying the content you have to see a line in the log (lower right pane) that the content version has been applied (see picture 2.1).

Outro

How did I discover the root cause which caused the fact that the self-monitoring was not reporting properly? I didn’t. Howcome? The whole place was lit up green and I didn’t find any useful information in logs or traces. If everything has a status “OK” and “VALID” one doesn’t really expect that something is wrong.

A customer message was created to get this problem solved as none of the logs or traces showed any useful information. The customer message went through to the development level and apparently a specific person had to be contacted to get the problem solved. The advice by SAP support to update the content was the right one though so from a support perspective I’m glad to see SAP support picked it up and solved the issue.

From a technical consultants point of view the whole notion of having a problem on which you can find basically nothing is frustrating. I hope this blog can serve it’s purpose and help out other customers / partners who encounter similar problems.