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todor_petrov
Contributor
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Starting, stopping and restarting NW04s servers is now only one click away

You’ve certainly have been hearing a lot recently about Widgets. The “magic” desktop helpers that do the hard work for you and all you have to do is click a button or two and then go drink a cup of coffee. The topic was not so trendy within SAP, not before Shai Agassi showed his little desktop helpers on the TechEd in Amsterdam. Now they’ve become so popular that SDN even provided a separate Download Area for them.

The only reason why there wasn’t such a great boom of widgets implementing SAP functionality was the connectivity to the backend SAP Systems, which had to be self-implemented and every time varying from system to system. This is about to change with the upcoming Widget Foundation that will be out soon, but until then, I’ve decided to take things in my hands and provide you with a widget that is every NW04s Administrator’s dream.

The “Server Observer Limited Edition” is only the first part of a bigger project that is undergoing development at the moment. Basically speaking it is a widget that gives you an overview of all your NetWeaver 2004s systems (at the moment maximum 10), displaying their Process Lists, J2EE Process Lists and the ABAP Process Tables with status, pid, time of start and running time.

The widget setup is very easy and intuitive, accompanied by a ScreenCam for answering any questions that may arise during the installation. Once up and running it can auto refresh on an interval assigned by the user or you can save some system resources and refresh it manually on request. With this function you’ll always be up to date with the status of your servers and therefore can react appropriately and most importantly on time.

Basically speaking this version of the widget overtakes some of the functions of the SAP Management Console.

The technology behind this widget is as usual based on a mixture of JavaScript and XML. The access to the SAP systems is achieved through mapping a network drive to one of the NetWeaver 2004s servers and from there running the “sapcontrol” application. So as a prerequisite you should have access rights to at least one of the servers that you would like to observe. For more details on how to set up the connection to the servers, please refer to the ScreenCam that is in the download package.

The “sapcontrol” usage is defined as follows:
> sapcontrol –prot  -user   -repeat  -format  -host  -nr  -function 

After executing the application at the initial server, its just a matter of calling a different host and instance number, so that you get the status of any NetWeaver 2004s server within your LAN.

The requirements for a successful installation include the presence of the Yahoo Widget Engine on the system, a standard Windows 2000/XP OS and a minimum of one NetWeaver 2004s Server in your local area network. Remote monitoring is also possible, but a VPN connection has to be established first to the LAN, where the servers reside.

The current LE version of the widget and the ScreenCam to it are available for download here.

In you don’t have the Yahoo Widget Engine running on your system - you can get from http://widgets.yahoo.com

As a closing word from my side, I would like to mention the “Server Observer Premium Edition”, which is so to say the “Big Brother” of the “Server Observer LE”. It will be packed with a lot of new functions, like for example – directly starting, stopping and restarting the servers that are being observed, therefore bringing the system administration to another much intuitive and interactive level. No more remote desktop logging and working with the SAP Management Console, it’s all at your desktop and one click-away from the result you want. Stay tuned for the PE version coming up on the IBSolution GmbH website mid March 2007.

You can read the second part of this blog NetWeaver 2004s Server Administration as easy as 1-2-3 Part 2.

Until then – happy widgeting!
 
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