New Business Process Monitoring functionalities in SAP Solution Manager – BPMon Alert Reporting Analysis

The Business Process Monitoring (BPMon) functionality within SAP Solution Manager offers the possibility to monitor the availability and reliability of business processes that have been maintained in a solution landscape. BPMon offers a wide range of different monitors for different business areas as well as cross application monitors, e.g. IDoc monitoring.

The Alert Reporting Analysis is an additional feature which can be used within BPMon. It is based on the Business Warehouse (BW) functionality included in Solution Manager as a SAP NetWeaver 7.1 system and is available as of SP05. It enables you to:

• Store measured values and alerts for a long-term availability
• Display measured values and alerts in graphical charts for a period of time to visualize a trend
• Analyze measured values and alerts furthermore using Business Intelligence tools.

The main functionality is available with SAP Solution Manager 7.1 SP05. For a better look and feel we recommend to use SAP Solution Manager 7.1 SP07.

With BPMon Alert Reporting Analysis in SAP Solution Manager 7.1 the functionality of the Trend Analysis Reporting with SAP Solution Manager 7.0, as described in the BW Setup Guide for “Trend Analysis Reporting with SAP Solution Manager”,

• Is simplified in the setup procedure
• Stabilizes the filling of the BPMon alert cube 0SM_BPM (instead of the sensitive job chain you have a stable extractor report)
• Uses the same data transfer framework as BPMon Analytics
• Has an enhanced default analysis scope
• Checks for illegal characters  

The dashboards are designed technically as queries, working on the collected and stored data in the BW. They are included in a web template which can be accessed directly following a URL in a web browser.

The BPMon Alert Reporting dashboard graphics allows tracking

• the maximum measured values [1] (see Figure 1)
• the maximum time to confirm critical alerts[2] (see Figure 2)
• the number of critical alerts[3] (see Figure 3)

  The analysis is done for a certain timeframe, a specified solution in SAP Solution Manager and optionally a specific alert type (see Figure 4).   

A drill down from day to hour is possible. The displayed Alert Reporting Analysis trends can be filtered regarding:

• Monitoring Type
• Monitoring Object
• Alert Type  (Key Figure)

With SP05 a major change in BPMon data model in SAP Solution Manager Release 7.1 allows one monitoring object to be assigned to several business process steps. Therefore an alert might not always be uniquely related to a business process or a business process step. As in the cube only one of those assignments can be stored, you should make sure that each monitoring object is assigned to one business process step only. That guarantees correct results when using the process and step selection functions in the old web template 0SM_BPM_WT0001.

With SP07 the new web template 0SM_BPM_WT0001N has been enhanced so that business process and step can be selected for multiple assignments, too (see Figure 5).

Figure 1 – Maximum Measured Values over Time with Web Template 0SM_BPM_WT0001N

Figure 2 – Maximum Time from Alert Creation to Confirmation over Time

Figure 3 – Number of red and yellow Alerts created over Time

Figure 4 – Selection Criteria of the new web template (SP05 and SP06)

Figure 5 – Selection Criteria (SP7+)

Further Documentation and Setup Guide

[1] For reporting on measured values use in SP05 and SP06 the old web template 0SM_BPM_WT0001. Please note that if you have referenced several steps to a monitoring object, than filtering for process and step is not possible. From SP07 filtering on process and step will be possible, even if you have referenced several steps to a monitoring object. For reporting on measured values from SP07 use new web template 0SM_BPM_WT0001N.

[2] For reporting on time needed for alert confirmation use new web template 0SM_BPM_WT0001N. Please note that from SP07 filtering on process and step will be possible.

[3] For reporting on number of alerts use new web template 0SM_BPM_WT0001N. Please note that from SP07 filtering on process and step will be possible.