Availability Monitoring with CCMSPING
With this function, you can monitor whether remote systems and their instances are available for work from the Alert Monitor of your central monitoring system (CEN). Important performance attributes for the dialog system are also collected on the ABAP instances as of SAP Web Application Server 6.10.
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.
As of SAP NetWeaver 04 SP Stack 11, CCMSPING has the option -push, which extends the function of CCMSPING. The following new functions are available to you if you register CCMSPING with the -push option:
CCMSPING actively sends availability data to CEN once a minute; you can make this interval longer as desired. Without this option, CEN only requests the availability data from CCMSPING every five minutes.
You can register multiple CCMSPING agents with one CEN for the monitoring of your system landscape. This means that, in addition to a load balancing for availability monitoring, you can also have certain systems monitored by multiple CCMSPING agents, and therefore check accessibility.
You can call the Java message server as well as the ABAP message server for availability monitoring. This means that you can monitor the availability of both ABAP and Java systems.
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 ABAP application servers for their availability. You can use the following monitoring methods to do this:
CCMSPING checks the availability of the application server at the message server of the corresponding system once a minute. 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 very fast and suitable for centrally monitoring the availability of hundreds of systems. The monitoring also displays the following performance attributes for monitored application servers (as of CCMSPING with release status SAP Web AS 6.20):
Dialog Response Time
Number of users logged on
Standardized dialog response time (as of SAP release 4.5B)
You can check the availability of application servers using an RFC call directly to the server. This is done using a data collection method of the monitoring architecture, which is called every five minutes. 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 Dynamic User Distribution).
You can monitor Java instances for their availability. In this case, the corresponding message server is queried as to whether the instance is reported as active. In the case of double-stack systems, you can use both the Java and the ABAP message servers for the monitoring, if the availability monitoring is appropriately configured.
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.
You can also use other techniques for availability monitoring: