Introduction:
Azure Monitor for SAP solutions is an Azure-native monitoring product for anyone running their SAP landscapes on Azure. This service is a public offering in the Azure portal. This solution allows customers to collect telemetry data from Azure infrastructure, SAP applications, and databases in one central location and visually correlate the data for faster troubleshooting. AMS can monitor different components of the SAP landscape, such as Azure virtual machines (VMs), high-availability clusters, MS SQL Server, SAP HANA database, and SAP NetWeaver, by adding the corresponding provider for that component. In this blog series, we will give an in-depth overview of the architecture, configuration, and visualization for SAP NetWeaver provider for AMS (version 2).
AMS (Version 2):
The following diagram shows, at a high level, how Azure Monitor for SAP Solutions collects telemetry from SAP NetWeaver in AMS:
The key components of the architecture are:
- Azure portal – Navigate to the marketplace within the Azure portal and discover Azure Monitor for SAP Solutions.
- Azure Monitor for SAP solutions resource - A landing place for you to view monitoring telemetry.
- Managed resource group – This will be deployed as part of the Azure Monitor for SAP solutions resource deployment. Following resources are deployed within managed resource group which helps in the collection of telemetry:
- Azure Functions: Each provider in AMS is deployed in a separate isolated function App. Azure Functions have a direct integration with application insights. Providers will have both timer and HTTP trigger functions as a part of the function App.
- Azure Key Vault: This resource is deployed to securely hold SAP NetWeaver database credentials and to store information about providers.
- Log Analytics Workspace: The destination where the telemetry data is stored.
- Visualization is built on top of telemetry in Log Analytics using Azure Workbooks. You can customize visualization. You can also pin your Workbooks or specific visualization within Workbooks to the Azure dashboard for auto-refresh.
- Customers can use Kusto query language (KQL) to run queries against the raw tables inside the Log Analytics workspace.
- Customers can use existing workspace within the same subscription as SAP monitor resource by choosing this option at deployment.
Architecture:
AMS Control Plane (Create monitor flow)
When the user hits create a button in the Azure portal AMS Resource provider creates the following resources in the customer subscription:
- App service plan
- Log analytics workspace
- Key vault
- Storage account.
Monitor Data Plane:
We have a monitor on the top as a wrapper for our providers. SAP monitor provider is a proxy resource unit that accesses the customer's infrastructure (SAP/ Database etc.) to fetch different metrics. A provider instance contains the connection information for the corresponding component. This connection information is used by the collector to connect with the SAP system to fetch the required metrics. Each provider type uses a different function App. As you can see in the picture below there are different function apps for the NetWeaver provider.
Provider instances are located inside the monitor. Customers can create a single instance of the same provider type or multiple instances of multiple provider types. All checks for a specific provider are in a function app. Each check is represented by its own azure function. NetWeaver contains 20 timer trigger functions that pull in 20 metrics. When a NetWeaver provider is added in AMS, the validator HTTP triggered azure function is called which validates the connection properties of the SAP System. All the provider instances of the same type share the same function app.
AMS Data Plane (Provider Flow):
In the provider flow, the azure functions inside the function app make a successful connection to the SAP system and fetch the telemetry information. Once the telemetry data is fetched it is pushed into the log analytics workspace inside the managed resource group created in the customer's subscription.
We leverage Azure workbooks to give a graphical representation of this data in the form of charts and graphs. Azure workbooks are connected to the log analytics workspace and Kusto queries are written to display the data in workbooks. Workbooks also provide flexibility to customers to refine the visualization based on their infrastructure needs by modifying the Kusto queries and saving the workbook in their azure resource group. Customers also have an alert feature in the Azure workbook which can be leveraged to set triggers in case of any unplanned downtime events and predict imminent system outages.
Conclusion:
From this blog you understood the architecture and design of AMS, in the subsequent blog let us configure the NetWeaver provider.
References:
- Latest over video of AMS: https://aka.ms/ams2video
- Latest announcement of AMS: https://aka.ms/amspreviewblog
- Share feedback & ideas: https://feedback.azure.com/d365community/forum/7d9bf169-4be5-ec11-bb3c-0022482baf2f
- Public documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/workloads/sap/monitor-sap-on-azure
- Maximizing Observability for SAP on Azure with Azure Monitor for SAP solution
- Part 2 - Configuring NetWeaver Provider
- Part 3 - Visualizing data through Azure Workbooks