AeonX monitoring SAP applications using Amazon CloudWatch application insights
by Phaneendra Pippalla, Madhavendra Kacha, and Milan Rathod
on 24 JAN 2023 | in Amazon CloudWatch, Monitoring and Observability, | SAP On AWS Monitoring |
Introduction:
AeonX AWS infra team monitors the client’s project AWS infra integrated into the SAP workload. The AeonX monitoring team is responsible for the day-to-day monitoring of the client’s AWS infra and identifying the if any issues happen in the AWS infra according to the client’s architecture design and troubleshooting the errors of the AeonX monitoring team.
SAP applications support critical business processes and therefore, customers require a comprehensive view of their SAP applications’ health and actionable insights to maintain the highest levels of security, availability, and performance.
Since 2015, Amazon Web Services customers have been using Amazon CloudWatch application insights to monitor applications like SAP HANA databases and SAP applications. In December 2022, we launched Amazon CloudWatch application insights for SAP HANA. This makes it easy to understand the health of your SAP HANA databases using native AWS services. In November 2022, we announced additional support within application insights for the observability of SAP HANA applications running on AWS. This made it easier to monitor and track the health of SAP HANA ABAP-based applications including SAP S/4 HANA, SAP BW/4 HANA, and SAP Business Suite running on HANA and any DB databases.
How do Amazon CloudWatch application insights work for SAP applications?
Amazon CloudWatch application insights enable you to monitor your complete application stack (applications, infrastructure, network, and services) and use alarms, logs, and event data to take automated actions and reduce the time taken to recover from system failures (MTTR). You can collect and access all your performance and operational data in the form of logs and metrics from a single platform rather than monitoring them in silos (server, storage, network, database, and application). This frees up important resources and allows you to focus on optimizing your systems further and achieving operational excellence.
CloudWatch application insights provide the automated setup for observability for your SAP applications so you can get visibility into their health. It identifies and sets up key metrics and logs for application and infrastructure resources, such as databases, application servers, operating systems, and storage volumes. It constantly monitors this telemetry data to detect and correlate anomalies and errors to notify you of any problems in your application. To aid in troubleshooting, it creates automated dashboards for the detected problems along with additional insights to point you to the potential root cause. This enables you to take quick remedial actions to ensure that your applications are healthy and that end users are not impacted.
CloudWatch application insights for SAP HANA provide a comprehensive unified dashboard of your SAP application health by monitoring Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, Amazon EFS, SAP security, SAP availability, SAP performance, and high-availability pacemaker cluster metrics. CloudWatch application insights provide actionable insights by triggering alarms based on predefined thresholds for each metric monitored.
CloudWatch application Insights for SAP HANA support the following deployment patterns with HANA and any DB database setup:
Distributed deployment of SAP HANA ABAP-based applications across multiple Amazon EC2 instances
High availability deployment of SAP HANA ABAP-based applications across multiple Amazon EC2 instances within two availability zones
CloudWatch application insights setup & monitoring for SAP applications:
Simple steps involved in setup and monitoring of SAP applications using CloudWatch application insights
CloudWatch application insights provide a guided onboarding process for SAP applications. To onboard an SAP HANA application in application insights of the CloudWatch console, choose to add an application and simply select the required resource group from the drop-down. User and password are not needed for onboarding the SAP HANA system
CloudWatch application insights automatically discovers resources for SAP HANA system such as Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon EBS volumes, and Amazon EFS file-systems. The deployment pattern of the SAP system is also automatically identified.
Problem detection and notification
CloudWatch application insights for SAP HANA observes underlying issues in an SAP system based on alarms, logs, and event-bridge events. Application Insights detects problems by correlating the SAP system observations with other infrastructure observations. You can get notified for any alerts via Amazon Event Bridge events, AWS Systems Manager Ops Items or you can provide your own Amazon SNS topics. Application Insights for SAP HANA provides automatic alarm creation based on predefined thresholds and anomaly detection.
CloudWatch application insights for SAP HANA create 36 metrics and 17 Alarms. These 36 metrics are created automatically when an SAP system is onboarded into application insights. Customers also have the flexibility to choose the metrics based on their monitoring requirements. Application Insights monitors SAP developer trace logs for 36 different error/log patterns and 4 patterns
Here AeonX AWS monitor team provides the sample image for the AeonX SAP client.
We can use the detected problems tab to find out the severity of the problem, problem summary, source details, timestamp, and status. You can use the detected problems tab to find out the severity of problem, problem summary, source details, timestamp and status.
Detected problem summary provided by Amazon CloudWatch application insights
When you click on the problem summary, CloudWatch application insights provides the problem details and insight to the problem as shown in the below picture.
AeonX monitoring team observe the SAP HANA DB application dashboard:
In the dashboard Page we can observe each node failure in the SAP HANA database, if any failure happens in the SAP HANA database automatically SNS notification triggers to related AeonX Team.
Get started with application insights for SAP HANA databases for each node failures monitoring today
The launch of CloudWatch application insights for SAP HANA enables you to monitor SAP applications on AWS including infrastructure components with minimal configuration. You can also detect errors, get alerted on problems within your SAP applications, and then drill down to identify the root cause and take necessary actions. To set up monitoring for your SAP S/4HANA application today.
Pricing for this solution for SAP workloads:
CloudWatch application insights is available for customers at no additional cost. AWS resources such as CloudWatch metrics, logs, events and SSM parameters are used by CloudWatch application insights to monitor your applications. These resources are charged to your AWS account. Please refer to the pricing section of the CloudWatch application insights documentation for more details.