Administration of Monitoring Pauses in the Alert Monitor

As of SAP NetWeaver 7.0 SPS 15, the administration of monitoring pauses has been significantly extended. Previously, it was only possible to define monitoring pauses for GRMG and CCMSPING availability monitoring. These pauses had no effect on monitoring and alert generation beyond the availability monitoring, that is, values were collected and alerts generated for nodes outside availability monitoring even during the monitoring pause. The monitoring pauses were only recognized within availability monitoring.

As of the above release, there is global administration of downtimes. Set the downtimes in the System Landscape Administration work center of the Solution Manager by choosing the Downtimes entry in the navigation bar. You can set up one-time or periodically recurring downtimes for systems, hosts, and instances there. The administration of downtimes goes far beyond monitoring and alerting.

The administration of downtimes offers the following new functions for the area of the monitoring infrastructure:

• Planning of monitoring pauses for systems and, if you use the function from the Solution Manager, for individual instances
• Two-level concept for monitoring pauses:

  You can deactivate only the generation of alerts, or also all collection of monitoring values. Therefore, for a monitoring pause for a system, you can deactivate not only the associated alerting, but also the entire monitoring for that system.

• Taking into account of all central monitoring functions:

  During a monitoring pause for an instance, nodes in the central monitoring system that are semantically related to the monitored instance are also deactivated, for example, availability monitoring with GRMG or self-monitoring of the CCMS agents.

• Scheduling of a monitoring pause from a monitored system:

  When stopping an instance, you can send a message to the central monitoring system, as long as the instance is monitored with a CCMS agent. The availability monitoring for this instance is then deactivated (more information: Scheduling Monitoring Pauses with CCMS Agents).

The creation and editing of downtimes in the alert monitor is described here. This is especially useful if you do not use a Solution Manager system as your central monitoring system, and the corresponding Solution Manager functions are therefore not available to you.

The central, monitoring system must have at least release SAP NetWeaver 7.0 SPS 15.

Monitored systems require at least the following release or patch statuses:

Checking the Activation

If your central monitoring system has the above release, the listed functions are automatically activated, in that a corresponding dispatcher is started by a startup method. You can check this as follows:

1. Start transaction RZ21.
2. Choose Technical Infrastructure → Downtime Dispatching → Activate Dispatching Job or Activate Data Collector Job.
3. If the corresponding job has already been scheduled, a corresponding message is displayed.

Constraints

The monitored systems for which you want to create monitoring pauses must be entered in the monitoring infrastructure as monitored systems (more information: Monitoring Multiple Systems). This was not previously necessary to create monitoring pauses.

Note the following points:

• If you are using a Solution Manager system as the central monitoring system, you need to ensure that all monitored systems are entered in the transaction Solution Manager System Landscape (transaction SMSY).
• If you are not using a Solution-Manager system as your central monitoring system, the monitored systems and CEN need to be entered in the System Landscape Directory (SLD).
  Note

  If a monitored system does not fulfill the release prerequisites described above, you can still define monitoring pauses for it. However, these then apply only for values that are stored in the central monitoring system (availability monitoring with CCMSPING and GRMG).

If you want to define monitoring pauses, proceed as described in Creating and Deleting Monitoring Pauses. The function is part of the configuration of availability monitoring with CCMSPING. However, as explained above, all monitoring and/or alerting for the relevant system is deactivated during a monitoring pause.