SAP Focused Run certificate expiry monitoring

SAP Focused Run can be used to monitor expiry of a lot of different type of certificates:

  • ABAP PSE certificates (read below)
  • Host agent PSE certificates (read below)
  • SSL certificates (see this blog)
  • Cloud Connector BTP certificate expiry (read below)
  • SNC certificate expiry (read below)
  • SNC expiry in SAP router

ABAP PSE certificate monitoring

In system monitoring you can monitor if ABAP system certificates are expiring or are already expired. SAP provides a standard metric for this based on configuration validation rule SAP ABAP PSE CERTIFICATES CHECK. This rule is taking all certificates that are to be expired in the next 7 days and all expired certificates.

This rule has two setbacks:

  • 7 days upfront warning might be too short
  • It reports all expired certificates that are already years expired and don’t harm the system

New rule for ABAP PSE certificate monitoring

For the improved setup we will defined 2 new rules:

  • To be expired certificates, with date selection -30 till tomorrow
  • Expired certificates, with date selection today till next 30 days.

Start with creating the policy in configuration validation (more on configuration validation in this blog):

Add a new policy Z_ABAP_PSE_TO_BE_EXP for the to be expired, and give it this syntax:

Add a new policy Z_ABAP_PSE_EXP for the expired ones:

Both are basically a copy of the standard SAP one with the changed dates.

Please note you need to change both the dates in the Compliant and Non-Compliant section.

Create custom metric

Now you can create a custom metric using the newly created rule. For full description on how to create custom metrics, read this blog. Create the custom metric in the ABAP system template:

Refer to the newly create custom CoVa (configuration validation) rule:

And set the threshold:

For the to be expired certificates, we only want warning.

We repeat the same for the expired certificates, but now we make it a red alert by setting the thresholds differently.

Make sure both are now activated for monitoring:

Trouble shooting

There might be false alerts raised for this metric. This is for both the custom and standard SAP metric. The source is usually the data collection.

SAP note 3138046 – False Alert ABAP PSE certificates expiring in Focused Run describes the checks to perform.

Go to the configuration and configuration validation FIORI tile and select the system and search for the PSE certificates data collection details:

Monitoring Host Agent PSE Certificate Expiry

You have configured SSL for enabling secure connections to SAP Host Agent. In such a case you need to regularly update or extend the validity of the SAP Host Agent PSE certificate. With Focused run System Monitoring you can create custom metric for monitoring SAP Host Agent PSE certificate expiry.

Setup Monitoring Host Agent PSE Certificate Expiry

Step1: Navigate to Host Template maintenance

SAP Host Agent resides at OS level of each host of systems that you are monitoring using Focused Run. Hence you need to monitor the PSE certificate for SAP Host Agents of each host in your customer network.

In our recent blog we have explained how you can configure URL Certificate monitoring in Health Monitoring in SAP Focused Run. However configuring certificate monitoring for each SAP Host Agent in your customer network using Health Monitoring will be very cumbersome.

An easier way will be to setup a custom metric in the host level system monitoring template which when activated will be automatically applied to all hosts for which the monitoring template is used.

For template maintenance you can navigate to System Monitoring Template Maintenance app on the Focused Run launch pad.

In the template maintenance app navigate down to the Host (Server) node and then to the respective template which you want to edit and click on Edit button.

Step2: Create Custom Metric

In order to create a custom metric you need to activate expert mode. For this click on the Expert Mode button as shown below.

After enabling expert mode you can click on Create button. Select Metric in the drop down from Create button.

In the Metric creation pane, under Overview tab enter the details as shown below.

Then in the Data Collection tab, provide the details as shown below.

For the URL field you need to mention the URL https://$SAP_ComputerSystem.FQDName$:1129/SAPHostControl/?wsdl in which the expression $SAP_ComputerSystem.FQDName$ will dynamically resolve the respective FQDN of the host picked up from LMDB. Hence it is important to select the check box under Placeholder and select LMDB under Placeholder type.

Then navigate to the Threshold tab and provide the threshold as shown below. In this example the threshold is Yellow if certificate is expiring in 30 days and Red if its expiring in 15 days.

Then click on Next button to navigate to the Assignment tab where we assign this metric to an existing alert. In this step just click on the Finish button to save the metric. In this step we don’t assign to any alerts yet as we are yet to create a custom alert for this custom metric.

Step3: Create custom Alert and assign to custom Metric

In the expert mode maintenance go to the Create button and then from the drop down select Alert.

Enter the details as shown below and click on Next button.

Then in the Assignments tab you will see the custom metric you just created. Select the check box for this metric and click on Finish to save the alert.

Now your custom metric is ready together with alerting active.

To activate this template update on all hosts navigate to Managed Objects tab for the template and click on Apply and Activate button.

Upon activation the new metric will be available in system monitoring as shown below.

For more details on how to setup SSL for SAP Host Agent you can refer to the SAP documentation here.

SNC certificate expiry monitoring

SNC Certificate expiry is very critical for ABAP systems where SNC logon is used. As soon as the certificate expires users will no more be able to login to system.

In System Monitoring for ABAP systems SAP provides a standard metric called Expiring PSE Certificates which monitors all PSE certificates that includes SNC certificates. When this metric turns red it will tell how many certificates are expiring/expired but not which one. Hence its beneficial to monitor separately the status of SNC Certificates.

This monitoring can be achieved by using Configuration Validation.

You can create a custom policy with the below XML code that checks the PSE_CERT store to check on status of SNC Certificate.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<targetsystem desc="SNC Certificate about to expire" id="ASML_SNCERT_TOBE_EXP" multisql="Yes" version="0000">
<configstore name="PSE_CERT" system_type="ABAP">
<checkitem desc="Valid in range" id="1" operator="">
<compliant>APPLICATION like '%SNCS%' and CONTEXT like '%' and TYPE like '%' and SUBJECT like '%sapci%' and ISSUER like '%' and SERIALNO like '%' and VALID_FROM like '%' and ( ( ( replace_regexpr ('^$' IN valid_to WITH (replace(current_date, '-', '')||replace(current_time, ':', '')))) &gt; to_number(replace(add_days(current_date, 30), '-', '')||replace(current_time, ':', '') ))
or (( replace_regexpr ('^$' IN valid_to WITH (replace(current_date, '-', '')||replace(current_time, ':', '')))) &lt; to_number(replace(add_days(current_date, 0), '-', '')||replace(current_time, ':', '') )) )</compliant>
<noncompliant>APPLICATION like '%SNCS%' and CONTEXT like '%' and TYPE like '%' and SUBJECT like '%sapci%' and ISSUER like '%' and SERIALNO like '%' and VALID_FROM like '%' and not ( ( ( replace_regexpr ('^$' IN valid_to WITH (replace(current_date, '-', '')||replace(current_time, ':', '')))) &gt; to_number(replace(add_days(current_date, 30), '-', '')||replace(current_time, ':', '') ))
or (( replace_regexpr ('^$' IN valid_to WITH (replace(current_date, '-', '')||replace(current_time, ':', '')))) &lt; to_number(replace(add_days(current_date, 0), '-', '')||replace(current_time, ':', '') )) )</noncompliant>
</checkitem>
</configstore>
</targetsystem>

Note: In the above XML code, SUBJECT like ‘%sapci%’, you have to replace sapci with a hostname pattern that you use for all your SAP ABAP system hostnames.

Once you have created the policy, you can directly activate alerting on the policy.

For that go to the Configuration and Security Analytics app in the Advanced Configuration Monitoring area.

In the app navigate to Configuration Validation Alert Management under the the Related links tab.

In the Alert Management app click on Create button to create the alerting for the policy you just created.

In the next popup, enter details as shown below and then click on Select policy to select the policy for which you want to activate the alert.

In the next popup select the policy by clicking on the policy name.

Now click on Save to activate the alerting.

Additionally you can also activate email notification on the alert. For this in the Alert Management main screen, select the alert and then click on Notification/Outbound.

In the next popup select the notification variant and save.

Cloud Connector BTP certificate expiry

With SAP Focused Run 3.0 FP 2 SAP has delivered a configuration validation policy using which you can monitor Cloud Connector BTP Certificate expiry.

Note: For using this functionality you just have to ensure that you have registered your cloud connector managed system to your Focused Run System and have performed SSI for the cloud connector managed system.

You can do the monitoring via the Configuration & Security Analytics app in the Advanced Configuration Monitoring area of Focused Run Launchpad.

In the app click on the select button to select the policy to monitor Cloud Connector BTP Certificates.

In the pop-up you can search for SCC and then select the policy SAP_SCC_PSE_CERT. This is the standard policy delivered by SAP that performs configuration validation on Cloud Connector BTP Certificate expiry.

This policy monitors if a BTP certificate in cloud connector system is going to expire in less than 30 days or is already expired.

The first view upon selecting the policy is the Systems view. In this view all SAP Cloud Connector systems registered in Focused Run system are listed. A systems is marked as non compliant if it has any certificate which is going to expire in less than 30 days or has any expired certificates. This view also tells how many certificates are there in the system and how many are non compliant.

You can click on the row to see the details of the certificates which are expiring or expired.

To know more about Configuration and Security Analytics you can refer here.

Also you can find more detail at SAP documentation here.

<< This blog was originally posted on SAP Focused Run Guru by Manas Tripathy (Simac) and Frank Umans. Repost done with permission. >>

SAP Focused Run creation of custom metrics for system monitoring

In most cases a fine tuning of an existing SAP template is sufficient for your needs.

In some cases you want to have your own metric defined to monitor a special part of the SAP system. This own created metrics are also called custom metric.

SAP, when you read this blog, please feel free to copy any of the custom metrics below into the standard SAP set. This will help everybody.

Questions that will be answered in this blog are:

  • How do I create a custom monitoring metric?
  • Do I need to re-create the custom metric per monitoring template?
  • What are examples of custom metrics?

Creating custom metric

In this example we create a custom metric to make sure that the background user WF-BATCH is not locked by accident.

There is already a metric in the ABAP template that is called User Lock Status. This can be used as a basis for our custom metric.

Goto your template into change mode and on top left choose Create (you need to be in Expert mode first):

And select Metric. Now the screen opens for a new metric creation:

Fill out the details, and create a custom description:

Now go to the tab Data Collection:

Copy the data from your reference metric here. Don’t forget to fill out the Parameter Value. In this case WF-BATCH. Also make sure you have a reasonable Collection Interval timing. Not everything is need to be collected every 5 minutes.

Now go to the tab Threshold:

Configure your threshold setting.

Now press the Next button and assign the metric to the correct group:

Now press Finish to save the metric.

The new custom metric is now available in the monitoring template:

You see that this one has the Custom created marked. Later you can use the filter on Custom created column to quickly find it again.

Deploying custom metric to other templates

If you have to deploy the custom metric to other templates: so far this is a manual action. Per template you have to re-create the same custom metric. I have not found a nice way of re-using custom metrics yet.

List of other custom metrics

See below:

  • Checking for certificates that are about to be expired and already expired certificates (in stead of only one out of the box metric that contains both)
  • Checking web dispatcher URL
  • Detecting errors in table locking of TBTCO
  • Detecting if file system is mounted
  • Detecting long running DIA processes
  • Detecting no more free work processes
  • Detecting OS signals
  • Detecting PRIV modes
  • Detecting message server disconnects
  • Detecting missing hardware ID
  • Detecting resource exhaustion in ABAP system
  • Detecting specific ABAP short dumps
  • User lock status of DDIC and SAP*
SAP, when you read this, please feel free to add these to standard SAP metrics.

Other interesting ones:

For system log message read OSS note 3391086 – Grey Metrics for ABAP Syslog.

Detecting errors in table locking of TBTCO

From availability perspective, you want to detect as quickly as possible if you are suffering from locking errors of table TBTCO. TBTCO table is used for printing. If the locking error situation occurs the printing function will fail, and even worse, it can impact the complete SAP ABAP system.

You can create a custom monitoring metric to measure and act on this.

Create technical name Z_METRIC_ERR_LOCK_TBTCO:

In the data collection:

Data to enter: RFC on diagnostics agent (push). Select ABAP System Log Stats. Filter on message text *TBTCO*. This captures severe errors for TBTCO like the locking error.

Define the threshold for alerting:

And assign the metric to the ABAP Instance not available alert group:

Detecting if file system is mounted

Some filesystems are critical to a business, such as those used in interfaces. This custom metric group will alert if a filesystem is not mounted.

Create the Bash Script to Check the Filesystem Status

Firstly, we need to create a bash script that takes the filesystem as its input argument and then checks its status. Create the following script called /sbin/checkfilesystemmounted.sh (owner is root, permissions 755). You may put this script somewhere else if you prefer, but be sure to refer to the correct location later on in this post.

#!/bin/bash
findmnt $1 >/dev/null && echo \{type:integer, name:FileSystemMounted, value:1\} || echo \{type:integer, name:FileSystemMounted, value:0\}

The findmnt command returns the mount details if the filesystem is mounted. The filesystem is passed as a script argument in variable $1. If the filesystem is mounted, the script returns integer 1. If the filesystem is not mounted, the script returns integer 0. For example, to check your desired filesystem, execute it like this as root:

/sbin/checkfilesystemmounted.sh /the/filesystem/you/want/to/check

The output will be in JSON format. If the filesystem is mounted, the value will be 1, as follows:

{type:integer, name:FileSystemMounted, value:1}

The name:FileSystemMounted is the name of the value to be picked up by saphostctrl, as described next.

Create the Custom Operation for saphostctrl

To load these values into Focused Run, we create a custom operation for saphostctrl. Create the following custom operations conf file:

/usr/sap/hostctrl/exe/operations.d/checkfilesystemmounted.conf

This contains:

Command: /sbin/checkfilesystemmounted.sh $[FILESYSTEM]
Workdir: /home/sapadm
Description: Check if filesystem is mounted
ResultConverter: flat
Platform: Unix

To test the custom operation, execute the following command:

/usr/sap/hostctrl/exe/saphostctrl -function ExecuteOperation -name checkfilesystemmounted FILESYSTEM=/the/filesystem/you/want/to/check

The result should be as per the following example:

Webmethod returned successfully
Operation ID: 0A02C69098121EDDA68C041B50FE858D

----- Response data ----
description=Check if filesystem is mounted
{type:integer, name:FileSystemMounted, value:1}
exitcode=0
Create the Custom Alert in SAP Focused Run

In Focused Run, we create an alert in a Linux host monitoring template. For example, the alert name is “Interface Filesystem not Mounted”. The Alert should be in Category “Exceptions” and the Severity is up to you. In this case it is 9.

Create the Custom Metric Group in SAP Focused Run

Next, we create the custom Metric Group . A Metric Group allows variants to be created, and each variant corresponds to a filesystem you wish to monitor.

Overview Tab:
  • Name: “Interface Filesystem not Mounted”
  • Category: Exceptions
  • Class: Metric Group
  • Data Type: Integer
  • Technical Name: INTERFACE_FILESYSTEM_NOT_MOUNTED

Data Collection Tab:
  • Data Collector Type: Diagnostic Agent (push)
  • Data Collector Name: OS: ExecuteOperation
  • Collection Interval: 5 Minutes (depending on the criticality)
  • CUSTOM_OPERATION_NAME: checkfileystemmounted – This corresponds to the custom operation for saphostctrl created earlier
  • METRIC_NAME: FileSystemMounted – This corresponds to the name of the metric in the JSON output by the bash script
  • RETURNFORMAT: JSON – This is the output format of the bash script

Usage Tab:

Threshold Tab:

As the script returns a numeric value 0 if the filesystem is not mounted, then the threshold will alert if the value is 0.

Assignment Tab

Assign to the custom alert created earlier.

Add Variants

The variable passed to the saphostctrl operation is “FILESYSTEM”. We can add the rest of the filesystems as individual variants. The format for the operation parameters is as follows:

FILESYSTEM:/the/filesystem/you/want/to/check

For example:

You can enter as many filesystems as you like as separate variants.

Activate Alert

Go to the “Metrics, Events, Alerts Hierarchy” tab, and activate System Monitoring.

Testing the Metric

In a non-Production environment, try to unmount a filesystem, and at most 5 minutes later, there should be an alert produced.

Detecting no more free work processes

From availability perspective, you want to detect as quickly as possible if you don’t have any free work processes left.

The template to be adjusted is the technical instance SAP ABAP 7.10 and higher template. Don’t forget to tick it on for monitoring otherwise it is not active.

In expert mode create a custom metric.

Create technical name Z_NO_FREE:

In the data collection:

Data to enter: RFC on diagnostics agent (push). Select ABAP System Log Stats. Filter on message number QoG with text *NOWP*.. For more information on system log messages, read this blog.

Define the threshold for alerting:

And assign the metric to the ABAP Resource Shortage alert group:

Detecting long running DIA process

In some exceptional cases you can have a DIA process that runs for a long time without action and still occupies the resources.

You can create a custom monitoring metric to measure and act on this. The template to be adjusted is the technical system SAP ABAP 7.10 and higher template. Don’t forget to tick it on for monitoring otherwise it is not active.

In expert mode create a custom metric. Create technical name Z_METRIC_LONGRUN_DIA_WP_36HRS:

Now setup the definition for the data collection:

It is using the Push.

And set the usage:

Last but not least: you need to set the alerting threshold:

The alert is raised if a single DIA work process is running longer than 36 hours.

Save the custom metric and make sure the template reassignment is done to activate the custom metric for your systems.

Detecting OS signals

In some cases the OS system will give critical signals to the SAP system that are visible in the ABAP system log. An example is the signal 11. When this happens, the system is in trouble and you as admin need to check fast to see what is going on to stop the system from full collapse, crash or very poor performance.

You can create a custom monitoring metric to measure and act on this.

The template to be adjusted is the technical instance SAP ABAP 7.10 and higher template.

Don’t forget to tick it on for monitoring otherwise it is not active.

In expert mode create a custom metric.

Create technical name Z_METRIC_OS_SIGNAL_RECEIVED:

In the data collection:

Data to enter: RFC on diagnostics agent (push). Select ABAP System Log Stats. Filter on MSG_ID QoE. This captures severe errors for OS signals.

Define the threshold for alerting:

And assign the metric to the system message alert group:

Detecting PRIV modes

The template to be adjusted is the technical system SAP ABAP 7.10 and higher template. Don’t forget to tick it on for monitoring otherwise it is not active.

Create technical name Z_METRIC_DIA_WP_PRIV:

Now setup the definition for the data collection:

This will collect the PRIV dialog processes in percentage.

Mark the custom metric as relevant for monitoring:

And set the assignment:

Last but not least: you need to set the alerting threshold:

Save the custom metric and make sure the template reassignment is done to activate the custom metric for your systems.

Detecting message server disconnects

From availability perspective, you want to detect as quickly as possible if you are suffering from message server disconnects.

Creation of the custom metric for message server disconnects

Create technical name Z_MESSAGE_SERVER_DISCONNECT:

In the data collection:

Data to enter: RFC on diagnostics agent (push). Select ABAP System Log Stats. Filter on message number Q0L, Q0M and Q0N. Any of those indicate message server errors. For more information on system log messages, read this blog.

Define the threshold for alerting:

And assign the metric to the ABAP Instance not available alert group:

Detecting missing hardware ID

From availability perspective, you want to detect as quickly as possible if you are suffering from missing hardware ID.

The template to be adjusted is the technical instance SAP ABAP 7.10 and higher template. Don’t forget to tick it on for monitoring otherwise it is not active.

In expert mode create a custom metric.

Create technical name Z_METRIC_MSG_SRV_HW_ID_MISSING:

In the data collection:

Data to enter: RFC on diagnostics agent (push). Select ABAP System Log Stats. Filter on message number Q16. This indicates missing hardware ID. For more information on system log messages, read this blog.

Define the threshold for alerting:

And assign the metric to the ABAP Instance not available alert group, create a custom alert group:

detecting resource exhaustion in ABAP system

From availability perspective, you want to detect as quickly as possible if you are suffering from resource exhaustion.

You can create a custom monitoring metric to measure and act on this.

Creation of the custom metric for resource exhaustion

Create technical name Z_EXHAUST:

In the data collection:

Data to enter: RFC on diagnostics agent (push). Select ABAP System Log Stats. Filter on message number Q40. This is the message for resources exhausted. For more information on system log messages, read this blog.

Set the usage to monitoring:

Define the threshold for alerting:

And assign the metric to the ABAP Instance not available alert group:

User lock status of DDIC and SAP*

From security perspective, you want to validate that 2 important users are locked in the main system clients: SAP* and DDIC. For more background you can read this blog.

Create technical name ZUSER_LOCK_STATUS:

In the data collection:

Data to enter: RFC diagnostics agent (push). User Lock status Data collector. Enter as parameters the user ID (DDIC) and the COLLECTOR_CONTEXT_ID as TECHNICAL_SYSTEM.

Set the threshold as a text threshold:

Set the red rating in case the string contains the word ‘not locked’ and set to green in case it contains the word ‘locked’.

Now assign it to Alert group for locked users:

Save the metric.

Repeat the same for SAP*.

Checking web dispatcher URL

When you are using a web dispatcher, you want to check that the main URL is available. You can achieve this via URL monitoring in health monitoring (see blog).

In some cases you want to integrate this vital start URL into system monitoring, since that is your main central tool.

You can create a custom monitoring metric to measure and act on this.

In the use case below we will setup URL monitoring for web dispatcher for SAP Netweaver Gateway serving FIORI pages.

Creation of the custom metric for web dispatcher URL monitoring

The template to be adjusted is the technical system SAP Web Dispatcher template. Don’t forget to tick it on for monitoring otherwise it is not active.

In expert mode create a custom metric. Create technical name Z_WEBDISPATCHER_URL_AVAILABILITY:

In the data collection:

Data to enter: RFC on diagnostics agent (push). Select SRSM Ping Http Unsp. Select the HTTPS protocol and setup the URL to monitor: /sap/bc/ui2/flp?sap-client=xxx&sap-language=EN. This is the main FIORI start URL. The port number is taken from the LMDB settings of the web dispatcher: $SAP_WebDispatcherIPServicePort->SAP_IPServicePort.PortNumber$.

Define the threshold for alerting:

We take here three measurements. If we don’t do this, a single glitch in the network will cause an alert to be triggered.

And assign the metric to the system message alert group:

Monitoring specific ABAP dumps

In System Monitoring of ABAP systems in Focused Run, with the standard monitoring template, we can monitor the frequency of ABAP dumps.

For monitoring if there are dumps of a specific type we have to create a custom metric. In this blog we explain how.

For creating a custom metric in the monitoring template, open the Template Maintenance App in the Advanced System Management area of Focused Run Launch-pad.

Open your custom ABAP instance level template in edit mode.

Switch to expert mode for template maintenance.

Click on Create –> Metric to create a custom metric.

Provide a Name, a Technical Name and metric type in the Overview tab as shown below.

In the Data collection tab enter details as shown below. Here for the parameter Error_ID you can provide the ID of the specific ABAP dump that you want to monitor.

Navigate to Threshold tab to specify the Threshold type and Threshold. For instance in this example we have specify the threshold to rate the metric as reed if there is 1 or more of the specific dump.

Now you can click on Next and then Finish button to save the metric.

Next you need to create a custom alert to generate a specific alert for this specific dump.

In the expert mode maintenance go to the Create button and then from the drop down select Alert.

Enter the details as shown below and click on Next button.

Then in the Assignments tab you will see the custom metric you just created. Select the check box for this metric and click on Finish to save the alert.

Now your custom metric is ready together with alerting active.

To activate this template update on all managed systems navigate to Managed Objects tab for the template and click on Apply and Activate button.

Now you can see custom metric under instance level in system monitoring.

<< This blog was originally posted on SAP Focused Run Guru by Frank Umans, Tony Swietochowski (DXC) and Manas Tripathy (Simac). Repost done with permission. >>

SAP Focused Run system monitoring overview

This blog will give you and overview of the functional capabilities of the System Monitoring in SAP Focused Run.

Questions that will be answered in this blog are:

  • What are the main functions of System Monitoring?
  • How to zoom in on systems and specific metrics?
  • How to optimize the scope selection?
  • How to use the tabular view?
  • How to check a specific metric across multiple systems?
  • How can I quickly get an overview of all my systems that are down?
  • How to set IT admin role of systems in LMDB?
  • How to store specific metric data longer?
  • How to use the aggregation framework?

System monitoring top down approach

From the Advanced System monitoring group in Fiori launchpad, select the System Monitoring tile:

Now select the systems in the Scope Selection block, for which you want to see the monitoring data:

Select Go when you finished your filtering. You now reach the overview screen:

If you want to zoom in click on one of the numbers, or select the Systems button from the left hand toolbar:

The traffic lights indicate where the issue or issues are: availability, performance, configuration or exceptions. If you want to go directly to an alert click on the alert number. Alerts are explained in full in this blog.

Click on a single system in the left column to open the system monitoring view for a single system:

On the left hand side, you can see the application (in this case ABAP) on top. You can also see the database (HANA) and application server, CI and their hosts. On the right hand side in a tree structure you can see the diverse checkpoints and issues in the system. The checkpoints are called metrics and they are clubbed together into logical blocks (like system exceptions, performance, availability). In this case there is a system exception due to too many short dumps today.

You can open the graph for this metric to see the details in time:

By clicking on the start and to date, you can select the date/time range or use the Select Time Frame button for a predefined time range:

Optimizing scope selection

In the scope selection of systems, you can create a few variants to speed up your work.

In this example we will setup a variant to quickly select all productive systems. In the scope selection block select the IT Admin Role for Productive System:

Now select the down arrow next to Standard in the top left corner and select Save As:

You can choose to set this variant as default. Setting it as public will make the variant available for all users. Selecting the Apply Automatically tickbox will apply this specific variant immediately. This might be preferable, or annoying. Just try it.

Upon pressing Save you will get a request for transport popup or save it as local request.

You can also create a similar view for non-production systems.

In the end you can always press the Manage button to change the variants and texts:

Now you can easily switch between scopes for production and non-production:

How to set IT admin role of systems in LMDB

This chapter will show how you can set the IT Admin role of a system in LMDB. Goals is that you can use it easily as described above in the scope selection.

Go to the LMDB Object Maintenance Fiori tile:

Search for your system:

Select the system and press Display to open the detail screen:

Press Edit to change. Now change the IT Admin Role and press Save.

Using the tabular view

In stead of using the hierarchy view, you can also switch to the Tabular View:

In this view you can for example sort the items on a column like the traffic light:

Or you can apply a text filter to search for a specific metric:

Checking a metric across multiple systems

If you have an issue in one system, you might want to quickly validate if you have similar issue in different systems, or you simple want to compare with different systems. From the monitoring of a system select the metric.

For this example we selected Short Dumps:

Select the i button to get the explanation text:

This gives the exact name:

Now goto the metric tool:

If you don’t see the correct metric, use the metric selection filter on the top right of the screen:

Press Apply, and you get the overview of this specific metric across all systems in your selected scope:

Storing metric data longer

Focused Run stores the monitoring data 28 days. If you need the data for specific metrics and systems longer, you can make use of the aggregation framework.

Start the Fiori application for Advanced Configuration of System Monitoring:

On the left hand side choose the option Aggregation Framework:

Choose the button Create Variant to create a new variant:

Fill out the name and basic description and press the Continue with next step button:

The next screen is bit more complex:

In sequence: first search for the extended system ID and press go in the top left section. In the bottom left section, select the system you want. In the top right section now select Add filter from the left button. And press the Add selected objects for aggregation button on the bottom right part. Now press the Continue with next step button:

Select the metrics on the left hand side and add the filters on the right hand side. When done press the Continue with next step button:

Using the aggregation framework

For using the aggregation framework there are no special requirements. Whenever you use an aggregated metric in system monitoring, you can simply use the details with a long period.

Settings for the aggregation framework

In the aggregation framework configuration screen, you can click on the configuration wheel top right to set the retention period for Short/Medium/Long:

System down monitor

A special function is System Monitoring is the System Down Monitor. This overview directly gives an overview of the systems that are considered down by SAP Focused Run and the systems which are set to having maintenance.

In the system monitoring screen select the System Down monitoring icon on the left icon bar (here indicated with the arrow):

You can see systems that are down and which ones that are having planned maintenance. If you have set up the SLA management, it will also show that aspect.

If you want to zoom in on the issues, press the i icon right of the system. Then select Links to go to the respective tool for further investigation:

For systems down the best tools are usually the System Analysis and the Alert Event management.

Changing settings

You can change the layout settings with the glasses icon:

You can show/hide the SLA and charts section as per your need.

Definition of down

The definition of down is in Focused Run: any red alert in the availability metrics. This can be:

  • Complete system down
  • One of the application servers is down
  • A core function is down (for example ABAP stack is up and running, but the Https port is not available)
  • Important subfunctions are not working (for example in the SLT system 1 or more source systems can not be reached)

Relevant OSS notes

Summary

The overview above gives the top – down approach in full: from the total landscape, to single system, to group of metrics to single metric.

<< This blog was originally posted on SAP Focused Run Guru by Frank Umans. Repost done with permission. >>