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Definition

The CCMS monitoring infrastructure has provided a reliable and universally-usable application for centrally monitoring your system landscape for many years. In the course of further development, the features and usability have been continuously improved. This section presents the most recent improvements. The prerequisite for this sectoin is that you are already familiar with the fundamentals of the CCMS monitoring infrastructure.

Consistency Check of the CCMS Monitoring Infrastructure

The large number of CCMS functions and configuration settings on the one hand, and the many places in which errors can occur on the other mean that it can become very time-consuming to search for the causes of any errors that occur or inconsistent configuration settings, and to correct these.

The CCMS Consistency Check is now available to you for this purpose. The associated transactions RZ50, RZ521, and RZ52 provide a variety of functions to check the configuration and runtime of the CCMS monitoring infrastructure, to display errors, and to correct these automatically. The checks are called from the central monitoring system (CEN) and include both the CEN itself and the monitored systems.

Note

The consistency check is currently available as of SAP NetWeaver 7.0 EhP 2 or SAP NetWeaver 7.2. We plan to make this function available from SAP NetWeaver 7.0.

Configuring Central Monitoring of Syslog Messages

You can use the CCMS monitoring infrastructure to monitor the system log, among other things (more information: Syslog). By default, the message text and criticality of the alert are taken from the settings in transaction SE92 ( Maintain Syslog Messages). However, you can also define the criticality and severity for a system log message directly in the alert monitor itself, by defining an alert filter. The relevant procedure is also described in Syslog Monitor.

You always need to performt his configuration locally, that is, in the relevant monitored systems. This can be a very time-consuming procedure, particularly in large landscapes.

It is therefore meaningful to centrally create filter settings for syslog messages for the monitored settings, and simply to distribute them to all desired monitored systems. A corresponding function is now available to you; the documentation for it is available under Configuring Central Monitoring of Syslog Messages.

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 periodic downtimes for systems, hosts, and instances there; the documentation for this is available in Administration of Monitoring Pauses in the Alert Monitor.

Improvements in Availability Monitoring with GRMG

The availability monitoring with GRMG has been extended with additional functions. The performance of the monitoring has also been improved. In detail:

  • Web services are modules in modern, service-oriented software architectures. With the help of Web services, IT infrastructures can be converted -step by step -into service-oriented architectures. You can use GRMG Lite to monitor the availability of ABAP and Java Web services; the documentation for this function is available in Monitoring the Availability of Web Services with GRMG Lite.

  • As of SAP NetWeaver 7.0 EHP1, you can have the processing of the GRMG scenarios run in the background, meaning that you can avoid problems due to the maximum runtime being exceeded. This also means that you can execute the availability monitoring across several work processes in parallel; the documentation for this is available in Executing GRMG Scenarios in the Background.

  • You can link a GRMG scenario with the long system ID of the monitored system in which the relevant scenario is running. This improves the performance of the GRMG availability monitoring if you are using the administration of monitoring pauses in the Alert Monitor and are not using a System Landscape Directory (SLD) to manage your system landscape. For more information, refer to SAP Note 1249451; the documentation is available in Activating and Customizing Monitoring with the GRMG.

Displaying the History of the Threshold Values of Performance Nodes

You can activate a history of the threshold values in the Alert Monitor, meaning that a log is available for each performance node. You can use the threshold value history to check when changes were made to threshold values, and by whom; if an alert occurs, you can also use it to determine what the threshold values were set to at the time of the alert.

The documentation for this function is available in Displaying the History of Threshold Values of Performance Nodes.

New Recommendations for the Configuration of the Central Monitoring System

For system landscapes of more than 100 monitored systems, design your CEN with multiple instances. We recommend that you assign each instance one of the following tasks:

  • The instance acts as a communication partner for CCMS agents, that is, you fix the registration of the CCMS agents to this instance.

  • The instance is used to monitor availability, that is, you fix the corresponding contexts to one of the instances.

The documentation for this is available in Best Procedure for Central Monitoring with CCMS.