How-to: Focused Insights – Tactical Dashboard
As hopefully all of you know, Focused Build is free for SAP Solution Manager as of 2020. With this also comes Focused Insights, giving customers the ability to define their own dashboards with the data they need. From all the different dashboard types SAP provides within Insights, Tactical dashboard is the easiest to start off.
The tactical dashboard comes with pre-define set of scenarios. Most of them work right out of the box, few still need to be configured elsewhere to be consumed by Tactical dashboard.
– “Performance” based on average response time
– “Availability”
– “Hardware Resources” for CPU and Memory usage
– “Database Growth” shows DB fill level and growth trend
– “Database Backup” for days from last backup.
– “Users Load” shows number of users logged in the system
– “Maintenance” info about software maintenance support (OS, Kernel, DB, product)
– “Hana Memory” for HANA memory usage info
– “Transactions Performance” lets you monitor a particular transaction, needs to be set up under the system view.
– “Security” based on Configuration Validation, shows info about notes and critical system parameters and users
– “Operations Dashboard Instance” is an alerts tracker coming from Operations dashboard (needs that dashboard configured first).
– “Process Integration”, PI monitoring needs to be set up first
Setup
Prerequisite is that your systems are already correctly maintained and connected in Solution Manager and all the data is flowing.
Setup is easy. First you must create an instance (like in all Insights dashboards). Instance is a logical group of similar properties/needs/evaluation. Then you can choose which scenarios to use and setup the instance default configuration. One of the key things to think here is whether to use current data period or yesterday for the evaluation.
Next you need to add your systems to this instance. This needs to be done one-by-one, so with a bigger number of systems, needs some patience. All the scenarios/metrics/thresholds are also customizable here again for the individual systems.
Using the dashboards
Dashboard consists of tiles, grouped together by system or scenario depending on the needs. It can be also viewed in a classic tabular view, but this hides all the fun of having a dashboard. There is also an option to filter the statuses by color, if the dashboard is to crowded for you and you want to have a quick dive only to the problem areas.
Besides giving the overview of the metrics and their status, some scenarios also provide trends by comparing recent period with averages calculated on a longer period.
By clicking on a scenario, you will get to detailed info and graphs about the metric. Here some scenarios have more options than others, letting you to switch on more data, or change the period to compare the values.
So, spice up your office monitoring TV’s to get some fresher look about you SAP systems!
Tips and tricks
When you have multiple created instances, switch on the Select toggle and open all the instances in a new window/link, then switch on the automatic instance switch form the Personalized menu for a carousel mode on a wall TV.
If no Memory info is loading, activate the metric “Total Memory Size” in host template –
2845155.
Some metrics might need a longer data period to be set up in System Monitoring – 2855230.
Database backup age shows incorrectly as 999d – 2910292, 2688496.
