Monitoring

Achieving higher availability and performance optimization is very important to ensure a robust and scalable environment. SAP WebAS provides efficient monitoring and administration tools for displaying the entire J2EE Engine system landscape centrally. If an error occurs, instead of logging on to each host component to check its status, the person responsible is notified automatically. Special tools providing cross-system detailed information help performing an efficient problem analysis to find the source of error. To cover these tasks the Java monitoring in the Web AS is divided into two main techniques:

Monitoring Techniques

For more information about the usage of the different types of monitoring, see When to Use the Different Performance Tools .

Java monitoring in Web AS is designed to take advantage of the SAP CCMS Monitoring Architecture. As described in the table above, most of the data written by the monitoring functions of the J2EE Engine can be easily transferred to the CCMS.

The graphic below summarizes the monitoring functions of the J2EE Engine and shows the data transfer to the CCMS display transactions.

Techniques for Problem Detection

• Availability Monitoring - in productive system landscapes, the availability of components has to be checked automatically. Using the so-called "Heartbeat" (GRMG), the administrator has a central infrastructure to check the availability of the J2EE Engine and JAVA based applications.
• Distributed Statistics Records (DSRs) - you can use the DSRs to trace actions that are processed using the non-ABAP components J2EE Engine, BC, and ITS. These statistics records provide information about the workload generated and the resources used in the system by action. This means that, on one hand, you obtain a very exact picture of the overall quality of a system, and on the other hand, if there is a performance bottleneck, you obtain information about its cause. You can activate the writing of statistics records using the Visual Administrator. You can display the DSRs in the relevant CCMS display transactions.
• State Monitoring - the J2EE Engine monitors its most important parameters, and therefore offers a monitoring architecture for accumulation, history and alert generation.
• Log Monitoring - all important events that occur in a cluster node of the J2EE cluster are recorded in log files. All SAP Web AS Java components use the same infrastructure for logging. The logging is simplified using a uniform configuration and a common display program ( Log Viewer ). The Log Viewer allows you to search quickly and efficiently for log files with certain error and event information over several servers. The log monitoring can be performed using the Visual Administrator or the CCMS.

Techniques for Problem Analysis

• Performance Trace - the performance trace can be activated to perform analysis from a central CCMS monitoring system if there are irregularities in the performance of the J2EE Engine. The performance trace provides duration information for the individual modules of the engine and therefore provides a finer granularity than the statistics records.
• Application Trace - a profiling tool for developers for debugging J2EE applications during runtime. A fast trace is often required, without setting up the VM in debug mode, restarting the container, or redeploying the application. The application trace is integrated into the Visual Administrator as a service.
• Single Activity Trace - you can use the Java Application Response time Measurement (JARM) implementation to analyze a single (user's) request to find performance problems in an application or to understand the logical processing steps inside an application.
• Java Application Response time Measurement (JARM) - a method for collecting response time data from Java applications.
• SQL Trace - an on-demand log of all JDBC methods that access the underlying database. This is not a general JDBC trace. Only methods that access the underlying database or methods that are otherwise important generate trace records.
• Developer Trace - a functionality provided by the SAP Logging API for emitting trace messages that are used for finding coding problems. The messages originate from delimited source code areas (typical areas are: components, packages, classes, and methods).