Architecture Overview: End-to-End Monitoring and Alerting in SAP Solution Manager and DBA Cockpit

The architecture of SAP Solution Manager comprises a number of tools and frameworks that collect detail data about databases and their statuses automatically. The tools and frameworks for automatic discovery of databases and database details include the landscape management database (LMDB), the Diagnostics Agent, and the extractor framework:

Data Collection and Database Monitoring and Alerting with SAP Solution Manager

Landscape Management Database (LMDB)

In SAP Solution Manager, all elements of a system landscape are modeled in the Landscape Management Database (LMDB). The core task of the LMDB is to provide information about the entire system landscape at a central location. The LMDB copies available data from the system landscape directory (SLD), but it enriches the data copied from SLD with additional information. For example, the SLD can provide the information which databases are available. For each database, the LMDB adds details such as the cluster topology of the database. All SAP Solution Manager applications are based on LMDB.

Diagnostics Agent

The Solution Manager Diagnostics Agent (Diagnostics Agent), which is installed on every local system of your system landscape, gathers information from the managed systems and reports the information to the SAP Solution Manager system. This includes information about the availability of the database and its host.

The Diagnostics Agent uses SAP Host Agent to discover all databases installed on a host. The Diagnostics Agent and the SAP Host Agent transfer some basic information, such as the database host, the database type and its name, to the SLD. In addition, the Diagnostics Agent reports technical attributes like cluster topology, database release, and properties required for a remote database connection to the LMDB. This kind of information mapped in the LMDB with the data provided by the SLD. Information about databases that do not run with an SAP system are also pushed to the LMDB by the Diagnostics Agent.

DBA Cockpit Backend, Extractor Framework, and Data Flow

The DBA Cockpit backend performs data collection via remote database connection and calculates the metrics of the monitored databases, such as performance KPIs, space, or buffer pool quality. The DBA Cockpit takes snapshots of database statuses, and thus is able to generate historical data (time series), which allows database administrators to keep track of short- and mid-term developments in the database. The data collected by the DBA Cockpit backend is also fed into the extractor framework, the central infrastructure for SAP Solution Manager for data collection and distribution.

The extracted data is reused by the following engines and stores:

• Alert Calculation Engine (ACE)
• Metric-Event-Alert (MEA) Store
• SAP BW for reporting

These engines and stores further process the raw data taken from the databases and generate alerts and metrics for BW reporting, which are then passed on to the different SAP Solution Manager applications, such as the alert inbox, reporting functions and also the BW reporting screens in the DBA Cockpit.

Predefined Alerting Templates Shipped by SAP

During the SAP Solution Manager setup, you can find predefined monitoring and alerting templates that contain the definitions or values of metrics, events, and alerts (MEA). Depending on the defined threshold values, incidents and notifications are then automatically triggered. For SQL Server, predefined metrics, events, and alerts are available for the following:

• Database availability
• Database exceptions, such as locks, missing backups, or error messages
• Database performance issues, such as bad buffer quality or problems with disk space usage
  Note

  The availability of the end-to-end alerting in SAP Solution Manager depends on your support license.