View observability metrics for SAP

This document describes how to view the system health status of your SAP workloads by using the observability service in Workload Manager. These metrics help you perform root cause analysis and troubleshoot issues with your workloads.

View system dashboard

To view the system dashboard for SAP workloads in a Google Cloud project, do the following:

1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Workload Manager page.

   Go to Workload Manager

2. Select a Google Cloud project.

3. Select Observability from the left navigation menu.

   If prompted, enable the required APIs for observability and configure the Workload Manager service agent properly. For more information, see Prerequisites for SAP observability.

   If you have all the required permissions, you can see a table on the dashboard that lists all SAP systems in the project.

   

   For each SAP system, review the following information:

   Field	Description
   System	This field displays the SAP system identifier (SID) of your SAP workload. If the application and database SIDs are the same, then the table contains one entry for both. If the application and database SIDs are different, then the table contains an entry in the format \[APP_SID\]-\[DB_SID\].
   Observability pre-reqs	This field indicates whether you've successfully completed the prerequisites required to observe your SAP workload by using the Workload Manager observability service. The value Enabled means that you've successfully completed the observability prerequisites for all compute instances that are running your SAP workload. The value Error means that the observability prerequisites are pending for at least one compute instance that is running your SAP workload. For information about what's missing, view the Overview, Applications, and Databases tabs of the observability dashboard.
   Workload type	This field displays the value SAP because the observability service of Workload Manager is available only for SAP workloads.
   Health	The overall health of your SAP workload. You can expand the health status for a system to see the individual health status of the application, database, and central services (ASCS) layers of your SAP system. For more information, see Understand system health status.
   Products	This field displays the names and versions of the SAP products that are part of your SAP workload.
   Region	This field displays the Google Cloud region, like us-central1, where you've deployed the Compute Engine instances that are running your SAP workload.
   Last backup state	This field indicates whether the last backup operation for the SAP HANA data volume was successful or not. This field is based on the value of the sap/hanamonitoring/backups/data metric that the Agent for SAP collects from the SAP HANA database of your SAP workload. The value Successful means that the last backup operation of the data volume of your SAP HANA database was successful. The value Failed means that the last backup operation of the data volume of your SAP HANA database was not successful. This field displays no value if any of the following conditions are met: Your workload doesn't include an SAP HANA database. There are no backups available for the data volume of your SAP HANA database. You've not correctly configured the SAP HANA monitoring feature of the Agent for SAP. The SAP HANA user that you've defined in the agent's configuration doesn't have the permissions required to query the database about data backups.
   Last backup on	This field displays the date and time of the last backup operation for the SAP HANA data volume was performed. This field displays no value if any of the following conditions are met: Your workload doesn't include an SAP HANA database. There are no backups available for the data volume of your SAP HANA database. You've not correctly configured the SAP HANA monitoring feature of the Agent for SAP. The SAP HANA user that you've defined in the agent's configuration doesn't have the permissions required to query the database about data backups.

Understand system health status

Workload Manager uses a color state to describe the status of an SAP system and it helps you identify its layers and sublayers. The following table describes each status you see on the observability dashboard.

Status icon	Status	Description
	Gray (Unspecified)	The observability service in Workload Manager doesn't have enough values from the metric sources for the most important metrics in order to define the health of a system and therefore the status is being marked as _Unspecified_. These metrics are usually associated with availability of any of the elements of the SAP system such as application servers and SAP HANA database. Metrics with an unknown or missing value causes the system status to be Unspecified. The specific item of the system is marked as Gray or Unspecified to show that the layer or sublayer health cannot be properly calculated as the Workload Manager observability service doesn't have all the required information.
	Green (Healthy)	The reported values for each of the metrics are within the defined thresholds for a healthy system. The system is healthy and has no issues from the perspective of the metrics monitored for SAP observability.
	Yellow (Caution)	The reported values for each of the metrics are within the defined thresholds for an unhealthy system. The system has low priority issues that don't affect the availability of the system and the system administrator can verify the system when possible. The Caution status is usually related to deterioration of the system performance but the impact doesn't represent a risk for the availability of the system. It might also be related to part of the system being unavailable without putting the whole system at risk.
	Red (Critical)	The reported values for each of the metrics are within the defined thresholds for an unavailable system. The system is experiencing availability and/or performance issues that are impacting the user experience and workloads potentially causing a disruption to the business operations. The system administrator should check the system as soon as possible.

The system health is calculated based on the report metric values for each system layer and sublayer. The following figure provides a general representation of the system layers and sublayers:

The system layers used for evaluating SAP workloads are:

• Central services
• Application servers
• Database servers

The number of sublayers depends on the architecture type of the SAP system that is being evaluated. For example, a centralized system has lesser number of sublayers than a distributed system and therefore the health status is tailored for the type of system that is displayed on the dashboard.

To get the overall status as Healthy for the system, all of the layers and sublayers need to have a Healthy status. Otherwise, the SAP system health status is marked as Unspecified. The following example shows a centralized system with the overall status as Unspecified due to missing metric values:

• Application servers:
  • Application server 1 (Missing): Gray
  • Application servers layer: Gray
• Central Services:
  • Central Services: Green
  • Central Services layer: Green

• Database Servers:

  • SAP HANA primary instance: Green
  • Database Servers layer: Green

• Overall Health: Gray (Unspecified)

The following example shows a more complex scenario of a distributed deployment with high availability showing the overall health status as Red (Critical) due to missing metric values:

• Application servers:
  • Application server 1: Red
  • Application server 2: Green
  • Application server N: Green
  • Application servers layer: Red
• Central Services:
  • Central Services: Green
  • ERS: Green
  • Central Services layer: Gray

• Database Servers:

  • HANA primary instance: Green
  • HANA secondary instance: Green
  • Database Servers layer: Green

• Overall Health: Red (Critical)

SAP observability metrics

Workload Manager calculates the system health status for your SAP workloads by using the following metrics:

• Metrics from Compute Engine instances hosting the SAP workloads:
  • Available by default, no external agent is required.
  • Metrics are located under compute.googleapis.com.

• Metrics collected by OPS Agent:

  • Requires the OPS Agent to be installed and running on the VM to have the metrics reported to Cloud Monitoring.
  • Metrics are located under agent.googleapis.com.
    • The required metrics using in observability for SAP are included in the non-chargeable tier.

• Metrics collected by Agent for SAP:

  • Requires the Agent for SAP to be installed and running on the VM to have the metrics reported to Cloud Monitoring.

  • Metrics are located under workload.googleapis.com/sap. The following metrics are used to calculate the health status:

    • workload.googleapis.com/sap/hana/availability
    • workload.googleapis.com/sap/hana/ha/availability
    • workload.googleapis.com/sap/hanamonitoring/system/replication_data_latency/total_time
    • workload.googleapis.com/sap/hana/service
    • workload.googleapis.com/sap/cluster/nodes
    • workload.googleapis.com/sap/cluster/resources
    • workload.googleapis.com/sap/nw/instance/role
    • workload.googleapis.com/sap/nw/service
    • workload.googleapis.com/sap/nw/availability

System details page

You can click a System ID (SID) from the observability dashboard to see a detailed view of the system.

Overview tab

The Overview tab shows high-level information about your SAP system, which is organized as follows:

• The first section shows metadata about your SAP system such as SID, the architecture in use, the region where the system is deployed, whether it's a scale-up or scale-out system, and the SAP applications and databases that are part of your SAP system.

• The next section shows a card for each layer of your SAP system, such as application servers, SAP Central Services instance, and database servers. You can view their overall health status and names of the compute instances that host them.

• The Health Insights section lists the unhealthy compute instances that are part of your SAP system. This table provides the reasons for why the compute instances are deemed unhealthy.

• The Maintenance Events section lists the compute instances in your SAP system that either have an upcoming scheduled host maintenance event, or recently completed one.

  For more information, see host maintenance for a list of supported machine families.

Applications and Databases tabs

The Applications and Database tabs show more detailed information about the respective layers of the system:

• The Applications tab shows information about application servers and the SAP Central Services instance. The Databases tab shows information about the database servers running in your SAP system.

• Both Applications and Databases tabs list the underlying compute instances and show the following information:

  • VM Name: the name of the compute instance
  • VM Status: indicates whether the compute instance is running or not
  • SAP #: the SAP instance number you've assigned to the app or database server while deploying your SAP system
  • Role: the role you've assigned to the compute instance in your SAP system, which includes the following:
    • For instances used as application servers: Application Server, Central Services, ERS.
    • For instances used as database servers to run SAP HANA: HANA Primary, HANA Secondary
  • Zone: the Compute Engine zone where the compute instance is deployed
  • Machine type: the machine type of the compute instance, for example n2-highmem-32 or c4-highmem-48

  • Agent version: information about the status and version of Google Cloud's Agent for SAP that is running on the compute instance

    The agent's version is displayed only when the agent is installed and actively running on the compute instance. When you hover over the icon that is displayed in the field, you can view more information about the agent's status.

  • Process metrics: indicates whether or not you've correctly enabled the process monitoring feature of the agent

  • System discovery: indicates whether or not you've correctly enabled the SAP system discovery feature of the agent

  • HANA monitoring: this field is displayed only in the Databases tab and indicates whether or not you've correctly enabled the SAP HANA monitoring feature of the agent

  • Connect: the options such as SSH using which you can connect to the compute instance. Your users might require additional permission to connect to the compute instance.

• Both Applications and Databases tabs also include a variety of charts and metrics that are filtered to only include the applicable resources in the chosen layer of your SAP system.

  • You can switch between the predefined and custom dashboards.

  • The predefined dashboard in the Applications tab shows the following high-level sections:

    • Availability
    • Performance
    • Storage
    • Networking