As customer or partner, you might want to know more about the health of your ABAP system in a cloud-centric system landscape.
Now, you might already be aware that you can use SAP Cloud ALM as the central entry point to monitor your solution landscape. What’s probably less well known is that SAP Cloud ALM comes with dedicated metrics to keep track of the health of your ABAP applications on SAP BTP and SAP S/4HANA Cloud. And what’s more, you can even add your own metrics.
In this blog post, I’ll show you which metrics are available, how you can react to alerts, and where you can find more information.
How to Check the System and Application Health
SAP Cloud ALM is the central entry point to operate cloud-centric SAP solution landscapes. (If you want to know more, see: https://support.sap.com/en/alm/sap-cloud-alm.html
Now, how do you use the health check in SAP Cloud ALM? When you connect your ABAP environment or your S/4HANA Cloud system to SAP Cloud ALM using communication scenario SAP_COM_0527, the ABAP system starts exporting a set of metrics. These metrics were designed specifically for checking the health of the ABAP environment.
When you are logged on to SAP Cloud ALM, choose Health Monitoring. It provides an overview of all your connected services.
SAP Cloud ALM - Health Monitoring overview
Here, you get a set of metrics for the ABAP system and for the SAP HANA database in SAP BTP. For SAP S/4HANA Cloud, similar metrics are available:
Health monitoring overview for one system/service
With one click on a tile, you can drill down to details and display a history. It gives you an overview of the metric evolution over time. For the HANA compute units, you have three dimensions and can display them all at once.
History chart for observed metrics
By the way, it’s not even necessary to call up health monitoring on a regular basis. You can also define in the configuration of SAP Cloud ALM that you get notifications when one of your metrics turns red.
Configure System/Service
The system-specific configuration allows you to define thresholds, alerts, and notifications. First, you need to configure thresholds to create an event for the metrics.
Configure metric thresholds
When you have configured your thresholds, you can define the actions for the events.
Configure events
For example, the event raised for a high HANA compute unit usage is shown below. It creates an alert inside SAP Cloud ALM and sends a notification to email addresses.
Configure event actions like mail notification
If your system exceeds the configured thresholds, you get this kind of email notification in your inbox.
Sample email of an SAP Cloud ALM notification
How to Analyze Further and Fix Issues
The health monitoring in SAP Cloud ALM provides a central overview. Each metric reflects a specific behavior of the system. Now, what do you do if a metric turns red? You analyze further and fix possible issues by going to the following Fiori apps in your ABAP environment in SAP BTP or in SAP S/4HANA Cloud:
ABAP Runtime Errors
This metric indicates if there are ABAP runtime errors in the system. To analyze the errors, you should connect to the affected ABAP service using ABAP Development Tools (ADT) with a user having the SAP_BR_DEVELOPER role. You can analyze the ABAP runtime errors in the corresponding ADT views.
Locked Business or Communication Users
If there are locked business or communication users in the system, the applications “Maintain Business Users” or “Maintain Communication Users” provide lists of locked users in the system. You can filter for locked users using the quick filters.
Current Sessions / Current Unique Users
The metrics are designed just for your information so that you know a high-level usage of the system.
Captured ABAP Statistics Records
With this metric, you can watch whether a specific workload is above a custom-defined threshold. As a technical basis, you capture ABAP statistics records. If you haven’t used this metric before, check the following use cases from the documentation: Using ABAP Statistics Records to Analyze System Activities and Monitoring Expensive Outbound Communication
If you already know how to capture ABAP statistics records: The number of captured ABAP statistics records corresponds to a capture profile that you configured in your ABAP service. The metric already shows you the name of the profile. Open the “Capture Request Statistics” app and navigate to the captured requests for your profile. From there, you can analyze what has been captured and whether these records point to any issues in the system.
ABAP Compute Units
The “ABAP Compute Units” metric exposes the used session memory. The workload using the memory can be analyzed using the “Sampled Work Process Data” app with the “Main Memory” view. It shows the consumption over time together with the captured workload.
If you experience ABAP CPU shortages, you can also analyze such scenarios using the “Sampled Work Process Data” app, but with the view for ABAP CPU time.
Certificate Metrics
The metrics Expiry of Client, Communication System, and Trust List Certificates report the number of remaining days for the certificate validities. Make sure that you define a good threshold for the remaining days in SAP Cloud ALM, so that you get alerted and can exchange the certificates in time. To import new certificates, use the following apps:
- “Maintain Client Certificates” app for client certificates
- “Communication Systems” app for communication system certificates
- “Maintain Certificate Trust List” app for certificate trusts
Critical Number Range Intervals
The metric for “Critical Number Range Intervals” only reports the fill ratio of critical number range interval. If there is a high fill ratio, inspect the number range interval and either create a new one or extend the existing interval using the “Manage Number Range Intervals” app.
HANA Compute Units
If you experience a high CPU time, you can use the “Tenant Workload” app to check the HANA CPU time per tenant. With this app, you get an overview of the workload causing high HANA CPU load. You can also drill down to single ABAP statistics records and even further to the SQL statements causing this workload.
Job Metrics
All application job-related metrics are high-level metrics. You should use the use case “Job & Automation Monitoring” on SAP Cloud ALM to get a more detailed overview of all jobs running in the system.
If you have a high number of delayed jobs, you might have a problem with high background utilization. The system can’t execute the jobs in time. The applications “Tenant Workload” or “Sampled Work Process Data” give you more insights which jobs are executed in parallel using all your resources.
Application Logs
The metrics gives you an overview of the growth of logs in the system. For detailed analysis, you should analyze the logs for the given section.
Application Logs with Errors
The application log for the section contains errors. The most important application log sections are available in the SAP Cloud ALM exception monitoring. You should analyze the errors here first. Otherwise, analyze the logs on the ABAP service.
More information
This sounds good, you say, but where are the details?
To get SAP Cloud ALM up and running, check the following overview page on SAP Help Portal:
These pages provide you with an overview of all available metrics and links to more information about setting up SAP Cloud ALM.
There’s also a developer guide available, which contains all the necessary information for developer and administrators to create your own metrics and provide them for SAP Cloud ALM:
- Developing Metrics for Health Monitoring (for SAP BTP)
Conclusion
I hope I have shown you that you can benefit from the monitoring and alerting capabilities in SAP Cloud ALM to monitor your ABAP system and applications within a cloud-centric solution landscape. With custom metrics that you can define yourself as icing on the cake, you can hopefully keep up to date about exceptional situations with your ABAP applications.
I’d like to thank everyone who contributed to this blog post, especially my colleagues christiancop and sabine.reich.
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