SAP NetWeaver monitoring- Azure Monitoring for SAP Solutions

 SAP NetWeaver monitoring-  Azure Monitoring for SAP Solutions

By

Ramakrishna Ramadurgam 

 AZURE MONITOR FOR SAP SOLUTIONS

Microsoft previously  announced the launch of Azure Monitor for SAP Solutions (AMS) in Public Preview– an Azure native monitoring solution for customers who run SAP workloads on Azure. With AMS, customers can view telemetry of their SAP landscapes within the Azure Portal and efficiently correlate telemetry between various layers of SAP viz-viz NetWeaver, Database and Infrastructure etc. AMS is available through Azure Marketplace in the following regions: East US, East US 2, West US 2, West Europe and North Europe. AMS does not have a license fee.  

SAP NetWeaver Monitoring 

SAP Systems are very complex and mission critical for many enterprises, it is imperative that we identify issues and alert based on threshold breaches with “No” human involvement. Ability to detect failures early can prevent system degradation/reliability dips of SAP systems during critical periods like Finance period closes, Payroll Processing, Holiday Sales etc. A robust and Azure native monitoring platform helps the SAP Admins to gain near real-time visibility and insights into system availability, performance and work process usage trends.

With Azure Monitor for SAP Solutions (AMS), customers can add a new provider type “SAP NetWeaver”, this provider type enables “SAP on Azure” customers to monitor SAP NetWeaver components and processes on Azure estate in Azure portal. The solution also allows for easy creation of custom visualizations and custom alerting, this new provider type ships with default visualizations that can either be used out of the box or extended to meet your requirements. 

SAP NetWeaver telemetry is collected by configuring SAP NetWeaver  ‘provider’ within AMS. As part of configuring the provider, customers need to provide the hostname (Central, Primary and/or Secondary Application server) of SAP system and its corresponding Instance number, Subdomain and the System ID (SID).

How SAP NW Telemetry is captured  

By leveraging SAP Control Web service interface:

• The SAP start service runs on every computer where an instance of an SAP system is started.
• It is implemented as a service(sapstartsrv.exe) on Windows, and as a daemon(sapstartsrv) on UNIX.
• The SAP start service provides the following functions for monitoring SAP systems, instances, and processes.
• These services are provided on SAPControl SOAP Web Service, and used by SAP monitoring tools.

SAPStartsrv binds at port(s):

• HTTP port 5<xx>13  or HTTPS port 5<xx>14, where <xx> is the number of the instance.
• The webservice interface can be implemented via the WSDL interface definition , and this can be obtained from the below WSDL
  • https://<host>:<port>?/wsdl
  • The above URL is used, to generate a client proxy in web service enabled programming environments like .Net, Python.

Pre-Requisite steps to onboard to AMS-NW Provider

• The SAPcontrol webservice interface of sapstartsrv differentiates between protected and unprotected Webservice Methods, Protected methods are executed only after a successful user Authentication, this is not required for unprotected methods.
• The parameter “service/protectedwebmethods”(RZ10) , determines what methods are protected, it can have two different _Default_ values, DEFAULT or SDEFAULT.
• Customers have to do the below to unprotect any methods to enable “SAP NW Provider”
  • service/protectedwebmethods = SDEFAULT -GetQueueStatistic –ABAPGetWPTable –EnqGetStatistic –GetProcessList
  • After you have changed the parameter, you have to restart the sapstartsrv service using the below:

                              sapcontrol -nr <NR> -function RestartService

• Below are the standard out of the box SOAP Webmethods that are used for V1 Release:

Asks & Feedback:

AMS asks & feedback form

AMS links:

• Latest updates on AMS
• AMS announcement
• Official documentation
• AMS quick start video
• AMS Azure Friday video
• AMS podcast
• SAP NetWeaver podcast
• AMS integration with Azure Lighthouse
• AMS & SUSE collaboration