Troubleshooting: Operating System Collector 
Purpose
No values displayed
There are various ways to check your R/3 installation if:
- the operating system monitor does not display any values
- the system displays messages such as Shared memory not available or Collector not running
- the values displayed do not change.
Process Flow
The quickest way is to log on to the R/3 System as the system administrator and view the
saposcol
status to verify that it is correctly installed and running properly.
Check the entry for the last write access. This entry should not be much greater than the length of the idle interval in seconds or than the current time.
To test further, call
saposcol
in dialog mode with the command
saposcol -x
The following message should then be displayed
OK: actual time of background saposcol [Mon Aug 14 12:20:17 1995].
A request is sent from the foreground program via the shared memory to the background collector, asking it to give its current time. If an error has occurred, the following message appears:
ERROR: background saposcol do not answer for 15 sec.
If you get this error, check your installation and start the correctly installed
saposcol
. You do
not have to restart the R/3 instances.
Result
If the test was successful, but you are still not receiving any new data in the
Operating System Monitor, it generally means that the work processes cannot access the shared memory. This is particularly common on AIX systems that have incorrect instance profiles.
See also:
R/3 Notes on
saposcol
in SAPNet. R/3 Note 5076, in particular, is important for AIX.
Incorrect or Implausible Data
In certain circumstances some values are incorrect even if you have carried out a thorough function check. Possible reasons for this are:
- The message N/A instead of a value means that the collector cannot collect the data. Older
saposcol
versions often use
0 or negative values instead of the message N/A.
- On some platforms, the collector itself determines the load average. The mean values are greater than 1, 5, or 15 minutes, and
saposcol
must already be running during this time. If, for example, a
saposcol
has not been running for the whole 15 minutes, this will result in a negative value to avoid misinterpretation.
Process Flow
Check the
saposcol
home directory for messages in the
dev_coll
file that indicate the cause of possible problems.
Check whether the values were listed incorrectly in R/3, or if they are incorrect in the shared memory. To do this, compare the values listed in R/3 with the values from the shared memory by using the
dump
command.