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CPH & ADM

An old dog learning new tricks - SAP education course ADM107 Day 1 (of 2) Jim Spath Business Card Posted on Oct. 18, 2007 07:14 PM in SAP Solution Manager, Business Intelligence (BI), Application Server
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ADM 107 - "SAP System Monitoring Using CCMS II" (where the "II" means 2, as in "I" is 1, in other words, ADM 106)

DAY 1 | DAY 2 | ADDENDUM 1 For those with access to the ASUG.COM discussion forums, please see this thread for background into why I wanted to take this course. Otherwise, see a brief mention of Dieter Krieger, an SAP expert on advanced monitoring topics, in one of my Tech Ed rambles. I downloaded several SAP Tutor demos, as suggested by Dieter Krieger to get up to speed on Central Monitoring, Central Performance History, and Centralized Auto-Reaction. In the meatime, Jason Schweitzer asked about a tutorial for feeding Central Performance History (CPH) into BW. Alas, I can't find it on service.sap.com, either. The course book (page 259) even teases us with the comment "Try the excellent SAP Tutor at http://service.sap/com/monitoring: Education & Workshops" (I can hear Bill and Ted now: "excellent!"). I was pleased to see that the instructor is Jeff Barr (of SAP, not the Amazon one). I took a BC course from Jeff way back when SAP training in Philadelphia was near the airport. Jeff is an amazing instructor, very intense, good-natured, and with a wealth of useful experience. He also mentioned he's the only U.S. instructor teaching one of the advanced Systems Management course. We hit a wicked pace the 1st day, after dire warnings about getting bogged down between the monitored and the monitoring systems. We covered the 1st four units, including 8 (count them -- 8) classroom exercises. The main content so far was on agents and central auto reaction. Tomorrow we're drilling into basic tasks such as monitoring jobs (we use AutoSys, so I am less interested in that topic) and log files (could be good). The big hurdle will be Unit 7 - Central Performance History. I'm glad I saw this at Tech Ed, including new reports still in the development queue. The course content is advertised as follows:

Configuration of the sapccm4x, sapccmsr, and ccmsping agents Use of the central data cache Configuration of central autoreaction methods with e-mail notification

Configuration and use of the central performance history and reporting on it using BW in SAP Web AS 6.40 Monitoring background tasks Monitoring file contents using agents Availability monitoring of RFC connections Connecting the CCMS to Alert Management (ALM) Configuration of GRMG monitoring (such as Web site availability) Further details on system monitoring

But, based on reading ahead, it doesn't look like we will get to do anything with BW. Darn. The course book shows the BI material as an "appendix", and Example 12 lists the "OPTIONAL exercise for experts - to be done at home" - "Create your own reports using SAP BI". That is pretty disappointing, although it would be hard to claim false advertising given this is only a 2 day class. Jeff listed a bunch of notes related to CEN/CPH:

730269 - CCMS agents: Java interface for registration 734247 - Registering CCMS agents for SAP Web AS Java as of 6.30 209834 - CCMS agent technology (composite note) 110368 - FAQ - CCMS MONITORING INFRASTRUCTURE 501746 - RZ20: Central data cache: Composite SAP Note 650719 - RZ20: Cache settings of CCMS monitoring architecture 985720 - CCMS: Performance of CSMCONTX table 577467 - Downporting the new PerfDB (CPH) from 6.30 development

Solution Manager? Oh, yeah, you can use your Solution Manager system to install CEN and CPH. Up to you. If anyone has a link to the tutorial on BI extractors for CPH, let me know! Jim Spath is a technical architect working for Black & Decker; his opinions are not necessarily those of his employer. CPH! CPH! CPH! ADM 107 - "SAP System Monitoring Using CCMS II" (where the "II" means 2, as in "I" is 1, in other words, ADM 106) DAY 1 | DAY 2 | ADDENDUM 1 Since day 1 went well, it wasn't surprising to have lowered expectations for day 2, particularly with much of the class hainvg already worked on 2 prior days of the ADM106 class. As has been typical of SAP and other training classes, students started heading out in the afternoon of the last day. This dynamic makes it challenging for the instructor to set the pace so that important material is covered early. In this case, Jeff moved through the majority of the Central Performance History (CPH) material, but held out the CPH to Business Intelligence (BI) topics in the "appendix" until late Friday afternoon. I held out with the other die-hards, but the run-through was completely theoretical by then.

The first topic was to monitor background jobs. I suppose the intent is to increase the usability of the base SAP scheduler, but we're using an enterprise scheduler (CA AutoSys), and have been for over 8 years, so I wasn't too impressed with the features provided. Further, the material clearly pre-dates the current SAP alliance with another 3rd party scheduler, so we only briefly touched on those capabilities. When I checked recently, there were over 70 products or versions of products certified compatible with the SAP scheduler API, meaning that customers have a wide range of choices in this space. The second topic was log file monitoring. This feature appears to be powerful yet not as obtuse to configure as other components. My lab partner and I were able to get parts of this working, but not all. As he class moved on to other topics, I know this is a feature I need to prove in our environment. Finally we were ready to set up the CPH repository. One question I asked and am still pondering is how to estimate and control space requirements for the data collected. During late afternoon lab work on day 1, I worked ahead and started collecting data on application server buffer values (hit ratio and swap to start).

Then we kicked off the data reorganization jobs. Note that the "quarter hour" job is listed as running every 1 hour and 45 minutes. I didn't ask Jeff about this, but I suspect that someone mucked with the base frequencies.

Finally, 2 screen shots, one with a tabular report and the other with graphics. I had better charts with titles, etc., but this was the only one I captured for posterity.

What's missing from the chart options is that this shows buffer qualities for different parameters.

The last unit we covered was alert management. Like Solution Manager, this is a capability added after many companies have implemented 3rd party tools. While the ability to centrally manage alerts is an improvement, it wasn't clear whether multiple alerts could be combined (to prevent redundant messages), how to correlate different alerts for root cause analysis, and we didn't drill into the alert console briefly mentioned in the course text.

Notes that Jeff referenced:

16083 - Standard jobs, reorganization jobs 176492 - Automatic email when an alert occurs (RZ20) 553953 - RZ20: Monitoring background jobs 886494 - Job monitoring: Alert required for non-released job

1.1.1. CCMS II / ADM107 - Addendum 1 Jim Spath Business Card Company: BLACK & DECKER INC Posted on Feb. 19, 2008 02:58 AM in Application Server, Business Intelligence (BI), SAP Solution Manager, SAP NetWeaver Platform
CPH - Central Performance History DAY 1 | DAY 2 | ADDENDUM 1

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I started this blog in November 2007, right after getting back to the office after taking the ADM107 class. I intended to put what I learned into practice "soon" so I would not forget what I learned. Well, it's now the middle of February 2008 and we have finally made time on the calendar to get back to this. This addendum (#1) will describe prerequisites we met, the agent configuration in our sandbox system, show the results of the first few days with one monitoring agent, and talk about the next steps. Life is relatively easy when you're in a class, with a focused instructor, classmates working on more or less the same objective, a system or set of systems that have been tailored fresh out of the box, and a generally distraction free environment. Go back to the office and guess what? Priorities intrude, the system isn't as clean and stable as in the lab, and most important, changes to even a sandbox system can interfere with developers projects and timelines. The nice thing about using your own systems is that the date and time formats are what you expect, in your timezone. Anyway, back to Chapter 1. Install the CCMS agents. Make sure they stay running. Our topology for baby step #1: Central Performance History (CPH) will reside on our Solution Manager system. As of today, this is a single node. Thus, no high availability, no path to production. When the system goes down for maintenance, backups, etc., it's down.

We will install agents on R/3, BW and SCM systems, starting with R/3.

So, which agents? Basis said we shall have "sapccmsr" and "sapccm4x". So we shall.

1.1.2. Agent Health Check


Fast forward past the agent install, which apparently went online in November:
-rw -r----- 1 sidadm sapsys 14399660 Nov 06 14:19 ccmagent_32-20000226.sar -rw xrw xr-x 1 sidadm sapsys 15141833 Sep 09 21:31 sapccm4x -rw xrw xr-x 1 sidadm sapsys 15285462 Sep 09 21:31 sapccmsr

The agents we have are from September 2007, so they are pretty fresh. The next step is to log into the SAP system to verify the agents are running. Transaction RZ21 "Monitoring: Properties and Methods" is the starting place for configuration and verification steps. As in many cases, a few menu paths lead to the same place. Under topology, pick "Agents for Remote Systems".

Or, under "Technical Infrastructure", pick "Display Topology".

In class, we installed, configured, tested and used Windows agents. At work, we have UNIX, so the OS start up routines are different. In either case, the agent tests need to pass. We found one "ONLINE" and one "SHUTDOWN".

Being UNIX savvy, I checked and found only one daemon running:
$ ps -ef | grep -i ccm jspath 1331232 1314872 0 18:57:19 pts/0 0:00 grep -i ccm sidadm 1368256 1 0 18:56:50 - 0:00 sapccmsr -DCCMS pf=/sapmnt/SID/profile/SID_DVEBMGS09_tow sidxx01

If you look closely, the running daemon is "sapccmsr" while the reported shutdown agent is the "sapccm4x" one. Don't ask me, I'm an engineer, not a topologist! After the Basis team went back to their desks and threw some runes, these were running:
$ ps -ef | grep sapc sidadm 1368256 1 0 Feb 15 - 1:48 sapccmsr -DCCMS pf=/sapmnt/SID/profile/SID_DVEBMGS09_tow sidxx01 sidadm 2633832 1 0 Feb 15 - 2:10 sapccm4x -DCCMS pf=/sapmnt/SID/profile/SID_DVEBMGS09_tow sidxx01 jspath 1024142 1376274 0 00:23:26 pts/0 0:00 grep sapc

Then, clicking on the "Monkey Wrench" icon as circled above showed successful connection where it had not before.

1.1.3. Monitoring Configuration


Let's go to transaction RZ23N, "Central Performance History" (hooray) and select "Assign Procedure"

We picked generic table buffer hit ratio as the first element to track (big surprise - see my blog on table buffer tuning). To verify that CPH is recording correct values, we can use a parallel test. Here are 2 shots from the RZ20 monitoring tree drill down: OK

BAD - the hit ratio has dropped. We shall see if this is noticeable with one-hour collection and daily aggregation. It might be necessary to use 15-minute (quarter hour) intervals.

Pick one from Column A, one or more from Column B and one from Column C. This screen shot is bizarrely collapsed to below 600x400 size.

Here is verification that the background jobs are running:

The above is visible in RZ23N via "Collection/Reorganization Jobs".

1.1.4. Reporting
This menu is accessed via RZ23N "Overview of Available Data" once the gears are turning.

Here is the CPH report grid in 2 dimensions, showing data have been collected over the past several days. It works!

As noted, this is an ALV graphic directly created within CPH menus. I've altered the Y-Axis to include a maximum 100% (it was 101%) and a minimum 95%. I also selected one hour which showed up as red squares on multiple days. That's handy I guess.

I then brought the same data into Excel and created a scatter diagram. This is a little easier on my eyes.

1.1.5. Next Steps

Add more MTEs. We have a short list and a long list. Add other systems. The sandboxes are refreshed, so we should protect this work. Include specific dialog transactions to track. This is a primary goal to replace daily manual data collection. Increase the data cache to 40MB, per the book. Figure out why the book says to update Op Modes, as it seems to work though we skipped that step. Feedback analyses from these reports to the Basis and development teams as needed. Hook this into our enterprise monitoring system, whether through auto reaction or another process,

[All opinions expressed are mine. No opinions were harmed in writing this blog.]

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