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Enhance System Visibility and Control with IBM Cloud Monitoring for SAP S/4HANA on IBM Power Virtual Server

By Anette Lörcher posted 3 days ago

  

🌐 IBM Cloud Monitoring for SAP Systems on IBM Power Virtual Server

Running SAP workloads on IBM Power Virtual Server for SAP HANA offers enterprise-grade performance, reliability, and scalability. The new  IBM Cloud SAP Monitoring feature is tailored specifically for SAP Power Virtual Server environments.

With SAP specific dashboards applied to the IBM Cloud Monitoring instance, the following features are offered:

  • Customizable dashboards for tailored metric views
  • Threshold-based alarms across all metrics
  • Failure analysis via historical data review
  • Alert statistics for critical, user-defined events
  • Flexible notifications via email, SMS, Slack, Teams, Webhooks, OpsGenie, and more

These capabilities are especially critical for mission-critical SAP applications like SAP S/4HANA and SAP BW/4HANA where performance and uptime directly impact business continuity.

⚙️ Three Configuration Options for SAP Monitoring

1. Automated Monitoring via IBM Catalog Tiles

SAP monitoring can be enabled with minimal effort using IBM Cloud catalog tiles:

By setting the optional parameter enable_monitoring = true, IBM Cloud automatically:

  • Creates a dedicated Virtual Server Instance (VSI) to collect and forward SAP metrics
  • Deploys an IBM Cloud Sysdig instance to visualize SAP metrics in UI dashboards

You can customize monitoring using the IBM catalog tile ‘Power Virtual Server for SAP HANA’ which offers the input variable "sap_monitoring_vars" to edit the monitoring configuration for deployable SAP Systems:

2. Semi-Automated Setup with Ansible Roles

For teams preferring easy, faster, flexible and repeatable monitoring deployments, please refer to  Monitoring SAP on Power with Ansible roles.

3. Manual Configuration

The manual configuration of SAP monitoring in IBM Cloud is rather focussing on the technical details and described here Getting started with IBM Cloud Monitoring for SAP systems.

📊 What Do the Dashboards Show?

  • SAP HANA Dashboard: Database metrics like CPU, memory, replication status
  • SAP System Dashboard: Application processes, instance health, and performance
  • Up to 99 SAP systems can be monitored on a single VSI, with dashboards showing metrics either per SAP system or in a consolidated view.

·           

Example of Dashboards:

SAP HANA Dashboard

Fig 1: The SAP HANA DB dashboard displays various metrics from the virtual server running SAP HANA database.

Fig 1: The SAP HANA DB dashboard displays various metrics from the virtual server running SAP HANA database.

The SAP HANA DB Dashboard displays the following metrics on the IBM Power Virtual Server running SAP HANA Database: 

  • System Health: This involves tracking the overall health of the SAP HANA database system, including CPU usage, memory usage, file system usage, and system load.
  • Database and Query Monitoring: SQL Execution statistics, Memory usage by service and total connections.
  • Network Metrics: Receive Rate (KB/s), Transmission Rat (KB/s), Receive/Transmission Errors per Second, Received Requests per Second, Transmitted Requests per Second, Collisions per Second
  • Disk I/O: I/O Throughput, Latency, I/O Service Time, Requests per Sec, Queue Length (Number of requests), I/O Wait Time
  • Alerting and Notification: Internal HANA database alert details along with date time and severity.

Features of the SAP monitoring dashboards

SAP System Dashboard 

  • Fig 2: The SAP system dashboard displays the various metrics from the virtual server running SAP application server and SAP HANA DB system

    Fig 2: The SAP system dashboard displays the various metrics from the virtual server running SAP application server and SAP HANA DB system

The SAP System Dashboard displays the following metrics from the virtual server running SAP application server and SAP HANA DB system:

  • Instance status: SAP instance names and their status of the configured SAP System which includes all SAP instances of the SAP HANA database, the SAP application server and the SAP central services.
  • Process status: OS Process names and their status of the configured SAP system which includes all processes of the SAP HANA database, the SAP application server and the SAP central services
  • Enqueue states: Replication state, locks state, owner state and arguments state
  • Enqueue server: Current lock tables entries, Peak lock tables entries, Requests/sec and Errors/sec.
  • Work process dispatcher: Dispatcher current queue length, dispatcher queue high, dispatcher queues reads/sec, dispatcher queues writes/sec and dispatcher queue max.

🛡️ Summary

Monitoring IT service health is standard. With real-time insights and historical metrics, IBM Cloud Monitoring acts as an early-warning system to prevent failures before they occur.

Authors: 

Achim Haaser - Software Developer for SAP on Power Hybrid Cloud, Infrastructure - IBM Deutschland Research & Development GmbH


Andreas Schauberer -  SAP on Power, Infrastructure - IBM Deutschland Research & Development GmbH

Anette Loercher -   RISE with SAP on IBM Power Virtual Server, Go To Market Product Manager - IBM Deutschland Research & Development GmbH

Source Blog Lead Image: Microsoft Co-Pilot

Source Fig1, Fig2: IBM Deutschland Research and Development GmbH

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