View observability metrics for SAP

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

Observability metrics

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.

    System dashboard

    For each SAP system, review the following information:

    • SAP system ID (SID)
      • If the application and database SIDs are the same, the table contains one entry for both.
      • If the application and database SIDs are different, the table contains an entry in the format [App SID]- [DB SID]
    • Workload type
      • In Preview, only SAP workloads are supported.
    • Products
      • The application version and SAP HANA version.
    • Region
      • The Google Cloud region where the VMs in the system are located.
    • Health
      • The overall system health for the system. You can expand the health status for a system to see the health individually at the application, database, and central services (ASCS) layers of the system.

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 (Degraded)
  • 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.
  • Degraded 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:

SAP 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)

System dashboard with critical status

SAP observability metrics

Workload Manager uses the following metric sources for calculating the system health status:

  • Compute Engine:

  • 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.

  • Agent for SAP:

    • Requires the Agent for SAP 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 get 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 detail page

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

Overview tab

Metadata

The Overview tab contains high-level information about the system such as the System ID, architecture, scale type, and the application and versions being run.

Health

The health of each layer of the system and the individual resources in each layer are displayed under the overview tab.

Maintenance Events

A table shows upcoming and completed maintenance events for the VMs that are included in the SAP system. If your VM's machine family support maintenance schedules, those events are listed in the table. For more information, see host maintenance for a list of supported machine families.

Application and Database tabs

The Applications and Database tabs contain more detailed information about the respective layer of the system. The Applications tab includes both Application instances as well as the Central Services.

List of VMs

Each tab contains a table at the top which lists out all of the underlying VMs included in the layer and contains the following information:

  • VM Name
  • VM Status
  • SAP number (the instance number, 00-97)
  • Role. Each VM has one of the following roles:
    • For application servers:
      • Application Server
      • Central Services
      • ERS
    • For Database servers
      • HANA Primary
      • HANA Secondary
  • Zone
  • Machine type
  • SSH (additional permissions might be required)

Dashboards

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.

The predefined Application dashboard contains the following high-level sections:

  • Availability
  • Performance
  • Storage
  • Networking
  • Application server performance
  • Work process utilization
  • NetWeaver memory
  • Workload statistics

The Database dashboards contain the following high-level sections:

  • Availability
  • Performance
  • Database Performance
  • Storage
  • Network
  • Database Utilization
  • Database Capacity
  • Database Backups

Remove workloads from the observability dashboard

To remove an SAP workload from the observability dashboard, disable the discovery feature in the configuration file of Google Cloud's Agent for SAP on each VM by running the following command:

  sudo /usr/bin/google_cloud_sap_agent configure -feature=sap_discovery -disable

Restart the agent for the changes to take effect.

Create custom alerts

You can use the alerting policies in Cloud Monitoring and create custom alerts based on the displayed metrics on the observability dashboards. Once you create an alerting policy, you receive notifications based on the configured threshold for each of the available Cloud Monitoring metrics including metrics related to SAP workloads.

What's next