Running SAP Applications on the Microsoft Platform

4 MIN READ

Configuring NetWeaver Provider in AMS (Version 2)

Microsoft

Jul 19, 2022

SAP NetWeaver Provider in AMS (Version 2) providers end users with a capability to fetch, capture and visualize SAP availability and application data via SAPOScontrol and RFC leveraging pre-delivered standard content provided by SAP. Below are the different approaches to fetch the metrics:

NetWeaver SOAP Metric collection:

The NetWeaver provider for AMS currently leverages a SOAP interface for fetching a subset of available metrics from the NetWeaver application layer. This includes Instance/Service/Process Availability, Work Process utilization, and Queue/Lock statistics. SAP Control Web service interface is used to collect the primary SOAP metrics for the NetWeaver provider. We are using SAPControl, which is a SOAP web service interface that exposes these capabilities. The SAPControl web service interface differentiates between protected and unprotected web service methods. The SAP start service provides the following functions for monitoring SAP systems, instances, and processes.

Web method	ABAP	JAVA	Metrics
GetSystemInstanceList	X	X	Instance Availability, Message Server, Gateway, ICM, ABAP Availability
GetProcessList	X	X	SAP system processes, its availability and their status
GetQueueStatistic	X	X	Queue Statistics (DIA/BATCH/UPD)
ABAPGetWPTable	X		Work process utilization
EnqGetStatistic	X	X	Locks

SOAP URL:

http://<hostname>: 5XX13/?wsdl (or)

https://<hostname>: 5XX14/?wsdl

hostname: SAP application server name and FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Names) - http://sapservername.contoso.com.

5XX13: XX is SAP instance number and 13 port is used for HTTP connection

5XX14: XX is SAP instance number and 14 port is used for HTTPS connection

The above URL is used to generate a client proxy in web service-enabled programming environments like Python. The following link provides a detailed description of the pre-requisites for fetching the SOAP metrics from the SAP system.

NetWeaver RFC Metric collection:

The idea behind this approach is to use SAP’s built-in HTTP module. This module has multiple services, where each one has its own interface and can be enabled or disabled depending on your needs. Each service has a corresponding ABAP Class that processes the HTTP Response based on the HTTP Request. These services enable us to call a remote-enabled function in SAP through HTTP protocol. It thereby allowed us to enable TLS (Transport Layer Security) based approach to enable the secure connection.  

In the next refresh of AMS, we are planning to enable secure communication between the AMS NetWeaver Provider and SAP through industry standard mechanisms.

The following is the list of RFC Metrics collected by NetWeaver Provider:

RFC Metric Name	TCODE
SMON Metrics	/SDF/SMON
SWNC Workload	ST03n
SWNC Memory Metrics	ST03n
SWNC Transaction Metrics	ST03n
SWNC User Metrics	ST03n
SWNC RFC Usage Metrics	ST03n
Short Dumps	ST22
Object Lock	SM12
Failed Updates	SM13
System Logs Analysis	SM21
Batch Jobs Statistics	SM37
Outbound Queues	SMQ1
Inbound Queues	SMQ2
Transactional RFC	SM59
STMS Change Transport System Metrics	STMS

SOAP WSDL Path:

This service returns the WSDL (Web Services Description Language) of a Remote-Enabled Function.

"sap/bc/soap" is the service that really executes the function based on the HTTP Request’s body.

The expected return content of this service is XML content with the structures defined on WSDL and values returned from the function executed inside SAP. Following are the SAP prerequisites for this approach:

Enable SAP ICF:

Login to SAP System.
Navigate to Transaction code SICF
Navigate to Service with Service Path - /default_host/sap/bc/soap/, and activate wsdl11 and RFC service:

Accessing RFC via SOAP WSDL Call:

This can be achieved using zeep, which is the fastest and most modern Python SOAP client. Zeep inspects the WSDL document and generates the corresponding code to use the services and types in the document. This provides an easy-to-use programmatic interface to a SOAP server. We already used zeep for fetching all the SOAP metrics in AMS (Version 1.0 and 2.0).

Sample code snippet:

wsdl_url = "http://sapservername.contoso.com:8110/sap/bc/soap/wsdl?sap-client=001&services=/SAPDS/RFC_READ_TABLE"

session = Session()

session.auth = HTTPBasicAuth(‘XXXX, ‘XXXX’)

client = Client(wsdl=wsdl_url, transport=Transport(session=session))

rfcname = rfcname.replace('/', '_-')

method = getattr(client.service, rfcname)

failed_update_result = method( DATA = data_value,

DELIMITER=';',

FIELDS=rfc_fld,

NO_DATA='',

OPTIONS='',

QUERY_TABLE='VBHDR',

ROWCOUNT = 0,

ROWSKIPS = 0

)

Explanation:

Customers need to supply their SAP credentials to connect to this WSDL and the session is authenticated using HTTP basic authentication.

WSDL URL can be divided into the following parts:

SAP Hostname and FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Names) - e.g.: http://sapservername.contoso.com
Port – port your ICF is running – e.g.: 8110
WSDL path - /sap/bc/soap/wsdl
SAP client Id - 001
RFC service name - e.g.: /SAPDS/RFC_READ_TABLE, /SDF/SMON_GET_SMON_RUNS or ENQUEUE_READ

The WSDL used above only defines one simple function (/SAPDS/RFC_READ_TABLE) which is made available by zeep via the client.service method: ‘_-SAPDS_-RFC_READ_TABLE’.

We need to process and pass all the input types from the python code which we need to send as input parameters to the RFC function module.

Create NetWeaver Provider:

Option 1: Providers can be created in Azure portal UI either by entering the provider connection details while creating the AMS in the “Providers” tab

Option 2: Click on the Provider link once the AMS is successfully created.

Customers need to enter the following connection information for creating a NetWeaver provider.

SAP prerequisites and connection details are explained in the AMS public documentation link:

Following resources are created as a part of AMS:

Once you have configured the NetWeaver provider, AMS connects and pulls the information from SAP, which is stored in Azure Log Analytics workspace and visualized through Azure workbooks. In general, it would take 15 minutes for visualizations to appear in the workbook after the NetWeaver provider is created successfully in AMS. Once you have successfully configured NetWeaver provider let us explore how to visualize data using workbooks.