Availability Monitoring (SAP Library - Technical Operations Manual for mySAP Technology)

Availability Monitoring

Purpose

With this function, you can monitor in the Alert Monitor of a central SAP system whether remote SAP systems and their application servers are available for work. Important performance attributes for the dialog system are also collected on the application servers as of SAP Web Application Server 6.10.

Integration

Availability monitoring uses the alert and display functions of the monitoring architecture. However, for data collection (that is, to determine whether a remote system is active and available), availability monitoring uses the CCMS agent CCMSPING (see also Installing Availability Agent CCMSPING). This agent is a stand-alone program that runs outside the SAP system. By using an agent, you can efficiently monitor the availability of a large number of systems from a central location, without an inactive system causing an error in the display of the Alert Monitor.

Features

Availability monitoring has the following functions:

· You can monitor selected systems for their availability. A system is regarded as available if the message server responds to the availability agent’s query and at least one application server is registered as active with the message server.

· You can monitor application servers for their availability. You can choose between the following monitoring methods to do this:

¡ CCMSPING can check the availability of the application server at the message server of the corresponding system. With this monitoring method, an application server is regarded as active, if the server is reported as active at the message server. This method is extremely fast and suitable for monitoring hundreds of systems from a central CCMS Alert Monitor. Availability monitoring also displays the following performance attributes for monitored application servers (as of CCMSPING with release 6.20):

§ Dialog Response Time

§ Number of Users Logged On

§ Standardized dialog response time (as of SAP Basis 4.5B)

¡ You can also monitor the availability of the J2EE Engine of the application server. The J2EE Engine is regarded as being available, if it is registered as active at the message server.

¡ You can also check the availability of application servers using an RFC call directly to the server. With this monitoring method, an application server is regarded as available if a free dialog work process responds to this call; that is, if it is possible to log on to this server.

· You can monitor logon groups for their availability. A logon group is regarded as available, if it is possible to log on to the application server with the best dialog system quality (see Structure link Dynamic User Distribution).

Availability monitoring is independent of monitoring of other objects in the Alert Monitor. You do not need to register a remote system in the central monitoring system to be able to monitor its availability.

The availability agent also waits for a short time (timeout) in case a system or an application server is temporarily unavailable.

Functional Principle of the Availability Agent CCMSPING

This graphic is explained in the accompanying text

Note

In principle, you can also perform availability monitoring (especially of non-SAP R/3 components) using a heartbeat alert, with which an alert is generated if no values are reported (see Triggering a Heartbeat Alert if No Values Are Reported).