Technical Articles
Cookbook for SAP EarlyWatch Alert Workspace
I have been ask to describe how to use the SAP EarlyWatch Alert Workspace to get informed about the most important technial issues in an SAP landscape. Here is what I usally do in a cookbook format:
To do’s:
- Subscribe to EWA Notifications
- Watch your favorite systems: Create a filter variant for Workspace
- What to look out for:
- New severe alerts in your landscape
- Systems that haven’t send data in two weeks
- Top systems with new red alerts
- Response time increase in ABAP systems
- Check your favorite systems’ KPIs
Details
1. Subscribe to EWA notifications
The SAP EarlyWatch Alert(EWA) is a weekly service which collects data from Monday until Sunday and transfers it to SAP. Most of the downloads arrive on Monday and Tuesday, however you can also choose another day of the week for the transfer.
See blog on how-to subscribe to email notifications in SAP ONE Support Launchpad for SAP EarlyWatch Alert Workspace.
2. Watch your favorite systems: Create a filter variant for Workspace
The application offers filters for customer number, system and database type. If you are responsible for one or several customer numbers and all the systems of these customer numbers, then it is best to use the customer number filter. If you are responsible only for specific systems from one or many customer numbers, use the filter dialog for System ID.
You can save your filter values as a variant, give it a meaningful name and save it as default variant. Consequently, the app will show your favorite systems automatically when you open it via link or tile.
3. What to look out for
New severe alerts in your landscape
The Alert card in the Workspace shows only the alerts that are most critical and will give the whole report a red rating. You directly see the alert short text and can navigate to the EWA chapter with the recommendations. Per default only the new alerts are shown from the latest report available and “new” means compared to the previous report.
Systems that haven’t send data for more than 2 weeks
It is important that systems send data on a weekly basis, because only then we can provide complete time series for important KPIs and show trends. Please make sure that your systems are sending the data on a regular basis. In the donut chart on the workspace you see 2 grey categories: “No current service data” and “incomplete data”. See SAP Note 1684537 for troubleshooting.
Top systems with new red alerts
The bubble chart cart displays the top 10 systems either by number of users or database size. Check for red bubbles: This indicates that a large system has a very critical alert, which is new this week.
Response time increase in ABAP Systems
The bar chart “Top Deviation in Response Time” shows the Top 5 systems that are much slower than the long-term average or much faster. A drill-down into the history of the response time can reveal a bad trend in the response time that should be followed up with a support service.
Check your favorite systems in the dashboard
The EWA dashboard shows technical KPIs per system. Watch out for critical findings for CPU and Memory utilization indicated in a yellow or red circle.
The system section of the dashboard shows 4 trend charts for the last 5 weeks. There may be a bad trend in response time or data growth. You get the definition of the KPIs, when you press on the information icon.
Check out the “What’s new?” card in Workspace to see the latest blogs and videos.
Feel free to share your favorite recipes how to use the EWA cloud apps in the comment section!
Prima, herzlichen Glückwunsch das ist eine sehr gute und erfrischend neue Aufbereitung der sehr wertvollen Daten, die der SolMan liefert. Weiter so und vielleicht gibt es ja bald auch noch mehr Security Themen wie:
das wäre Klasse und würde uns bei den Sicherheitsthemen den Rücken stärken.
Hello Susanne Glänzer,
we have some SAP Systems and so a lot of EWA Reports every week. An overview like the EWA Workspace will be a useful tool.
There is some Features I like in the EWA Reports of which I would like a summary in the EWA Workspace. Additionally to the useful tiles which are already implemented in the EWA Workspace, it is especially the passge "Alert Overview", which is really the Name of the first part of the Report, is what I would like to have as a summary on in EWA Workspace. It should Show which are the Systems with the most urgent alerts, and which are the most urgent alerts common among which Systems. So I can see at a glance which System is most heavily affected, and which are the alerts most risky for the landscape at the Moment.
Also a prioritized Task list for our landscape based on the EWA Reports would be very helpful.
Thank you.
With Kind Regards,
Franz Lengel
Hello Susanne Glänzer,
Can we extend the filter with an additional field: installation number.
Especially for complex customer it make life easier.
Regards
Ulrich Fundus
Hi Ulrich,
you can use the value help for filter field System to get into a screen where you can filter for installation number.
Best regards,
Susanne
Hi Susanne,
Thanks for sharing this cookbook on EWA workspace. I've found it a very useful tool to look at trends for our systems.
Could you please let me know how we can add additional systems to report out of this? Some of our Production systems are not listed here despite of them being marked for "Send to SAP" in EWA configuration.
Hi Guru Holla,
try SAP Note 1684537 to troubleshoot the systems which you don't see. SAP EarlyWatch Alert Workspace only shows ABAP and HANA stand-alone systems. Java systems are only shown in the EWA Viewer, if they are sent via a Focused Run system.
Best regards,
Susanne
Hi Susanne,
Thanks! That's probably it. I was hoping to check the reports for JAVA and Mobile (SMP) systems.
EWA viewer? Is that on the Solution Manager system in our landscape or an option on the workspace?
Is there a plan in further releases to get reports from non ABAP and HANA systems?
Hi Guru,
sorry for my late reply!
EWA Viewer is the part of Workspace where you can see the report chapters. It is also available in Solution Manager on-premise and can be accessed via the tile: My EWA Service Reports.
You can already connect you SAP HANA stand-alone system to Workspace. And if you have a non-ABAP product which runs on SAP HANA, you can connect the SAP HANA database to Solution Manager and send the data to SAP. The system will then be displayed in Workspace as SAP HANA Platform Edition with all SAP HANA KPI time series.
Best regards,
Susanne
Hi,
the EWA viewer is available on SolMan on-premise and in EWA Workspace(access via donut chart).
Best regards,
Susanne
Hi Susanne,
I see no dashboard or EWA Workspace for our on-premise systems in Solution Manager. Would we have to build a dashboard locally, or send all of our non-productions systems to the SAP Workspace, or is there another option, or more likely I'm missing something? Our non-production systems don't currently send to SAP.
Thanks,
Mike
Hi Mike,
you can only send data from production and test systems to SAP and see it in workspace and dashboard. Development and Sandbox systems cannot be displayed in these apps.
These applications are only provided as cloud extension apps, not in Solution Manager on-premise.
Best regards,
Susanne
Hi Susanne,
I remember seeing a screen showing a comparison of either system response transaction response. I'm not sure if this is part of the EWA Workspace. Can you please share some details in case there is such a functionality? Ideally we would like to compare performance across different timeframes.
Thanks
Vincent
Hi Vincent,
have a look at my new blog for details: https://blogs.sap.com/2020/06/05/evaluating-performance-with-sap-earlywatch-alert
Best regards,
Susanne
Hi Susanne,
Please can you help me how to remove SAP system from EWA Workspace. We have few system to be removed as of now.
Regards,
Hari
Hi Hari,
sure! Send me an email for details.
Best regards,
Susanne
Susanne,
Please can you share me e-mail ID, my e-mail is krishna0989@gmail.com
Regards,
Hari
Hello Susanne Glänzer
Step 1 seems to be not necesssary any more, as there seems to be new subscribe mechanisms now: https://blogs.sap.com/2020/09/15/stay-informed-about-new-sap-earlywatch-alerts-you-are-interested-in/ which I found about the “news section” (good idea!) down in https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/ewaworkspace .
The EWA Service is really innovative and is continuos improving. Great job! Thanks for all helpful blogs and sessions to the complete team!
Thanks for the reminder and your positive feedback! I have updated step 1 accordingly.
Best regards,
Susanne
Hi Susanne,
Customer has some clarifications about the data that they see on EWA workspace. please help on below queries:
Thanks!
Hi Jayobo,
thanks for sharing. Please open a ticket on component SV-SCS-EWA and I will take care.
Best regards,
Susanne
Hi Susanne,
Thanks for the response. Done, raised the incident.
Hi Susanne,
Good day!
Just wondering, is it possible to view the Record count per day in the 2 Billion Record Limit? It can show only per week.
Regards,
Sharmane
Hi Sharmane,
it is not possible to get the number of record counts per day. The data is only collected once per week with a snapshot. Is there a specific reason, why daily growth is relevant for you?
Best regards,
Susanne
Hi Susanne,
Thanks, that's what I thought.
I have a client that reached the 2Billion record limit and currently fixing it, they just asked if its possible to see per day.
Hi Sharmane,
in very rare cases tables are growing so fast, that our EWA app will have no chance to detect the issue. We need at least 2 weeks of fast growth to detect it and then we will send out a notification on accelerated growth.
Best regards,
Susanne
Hi Susanne,
Is there a way to exclude from EWA monitoring known ABAP dumps, which appear every week after offline DB backup (about 70 in 15 minutes) and spoil the monitoring picture? We know that DB is not accessible for 15 minutes once per week, but we can not explain it to EWA report.
Thank you!
Olga
Hi Susanne,
Thank you for the blog,
In the recent times the EWA workspace is changed and now we don see the application performance related graphs(for example for BW pervious we have process chains run for longer durations, temperature graph when in what time of a day executions are more in the system...)
Please let us know if the features are disabled or relocated to somewhere else within the workspace
Thank you,
Sravan Kumar
Hi Sravan,
the EWA dashboard in EWA workspace has not changed lately. However, the section "Business Warehouse" in the EWA dashboard is shown/hidden dynamically depending on the availability of the data.
I would recommend to open an incident on component SV-SCS-EWA, so that the support team can check your dashboard for the root cause, why data is missing or the system is not recognized as an BW system.
Sorry for the inconvenience and best regards,
Susanne
it is the user experience section in Workspace missing for our system
The same applies for the user experience section. A ticket would be great!
Hi Susanne,
Currently we are looking into possibilities to intensify the use of EWA Solution Finder / EWA Workspace / EWA Dashboard. One of the hurdles to overcome and increase adoption, is the apparent lack of whitelist-functionality and/or exemption management on EWA findings.
An example of why our EWA Solution Finder list will always have crtitcal findings is the fact that emergency users have SAP_ALL authorization. These emergency users are by default deactivated and a separate approval-workflow needs to be completed before these users become operational. In other words, we have an audit-proof firefighteing process in place. Nevertheless this will show up as a critical EWA-finding. Therefore deminishing the attention value of a red flag. People get used to seeing red flags and will ignore all EWA findings in future.
So the big question is: How to whitelist EWA-findings in EWA Solution Finder / EWA Workspace / EWA Dashboard ?
Perhaps I need to elaborate a bit more on what I am looking for. It is not that I want to mask or undo audit red flags. Along the lines of 'comply or explain' I am looking for similar functionality which we are using right now for custom code management, being: pseudo comments/pragma's, whitelisting via check variants and exemption management (incl. 4-eyes principle & SOD).
I believe for the EWA Solution Finder to be truly effective you should strive for zero red flags. That way, if at some point a red flag pops up it automatically grabs your full attention. If, and I think this is true for any monitoring tool, you are used to having multiple red flags all the time it will automatically decrease your sense of urgency. How then to distinguish between 'dark red' flags which need immediate attention and 'light red' flags which will always turn up no matter what you do or don't do?
As for auditors asking nasty questions (it's their job to do so) you can show them you have a well-defined process in place on who is entitled to whitelist or exempt certain findings. And since this is SAP we are talking about I naturally assume the system will log all these actions for me, which in turn should make the auditor happy again.
So, in short... I am looking for whitelist-functionality or some kind of EWA-exemption process. Is this possible or will it be possible in future?
Happy to hear your thoughts on this.
BR Dino
Hi Dino,
thank you so much for elaborating on the use case! In fact, we are currently discussing this kind of whitelist-functionality feature for SAP EarlyWatch Alert Solution Finder already. I would be happy to include you into our customer feedback loop, as soon as we can share more details. However, as always, I have to mention the disclaimer, that our plans may change without further notice and we may not continue with developing this feature.
Best regards,
Susanne