Health Monitoring in SAP Cloud ALM
What is it and how it works?
Health Monitoring is application in SAP Cloud ALM that provides us with an overview on the healthiness of all cloud services and on-premise systems. We can check it from an application and customers perspective. The idea of Health Monitoring is to provide a central view of all our services in our landscape and to have a central alerting capability.
Alerting Functionality is something that separates Health Monitoring from the Real User Monitoring. While they both concentrate mainly on monitoring performance, only Health Monitoring has the capability for alerting.
Application works by constantly connecting metrics about health status of cloud services of our systems, metrics regarding to the usage, usage of resources and these metrics that are regularly collected are sent to SAP Cloud ALM into Health Monitoring Application which displays the data we can use to monitor, do analytics, and configure alerting using thresholds.
How to set it up?
Usually, it is a two-step process to set up Health Monitoring in SAP Cloud ALM. First step is to connect service or system to our SAP Cloud ALM instance in Landscape Management. Then we can set up the Health Monitoring itself. Guides for setting up Health Monitoring we can find in SAP Cloud ALM Expert Portal where we can see guides for each of the supported products.
For example, monitoring SAP Cloud ALM components there is not any additional setup steps needed because the monitoring is activated automatically after we have subscribed to SAP Cloud ALM Service.
What are the benefits?
Health Monitoring application offers us the following features:
- We can monitor the availability of services, systems, and components.
- We can monitor the trends in the resource usage. For example, how many users are logged on or resources used by the service.
- We can see information about certificates with their expiration date.
- It will provide us with system monitoring capability in SAP Cloud ALM showing us for example issues on a database level or information about CPU memory usage.
- With it we can check the reported errors and configure alerting.
Health Monitoring provides us with embedded analytics which helps us to identify the root cause of discovered issue. For each metric which is collected we can see the single measurements, history of measurements to see how the certain metric was behaving in a specific time.
We can configure certain alerting for unwanted situations. Alerts are generated in SAP Cloud ALM, and we can also handle these alerts there. We can configure alerts to send us email notification to get notified about alerts. Or even start an Operation Flow which may automatically resolve the issue we are experiencing. To start an Operation Flow we have to register the Operation Flow in Operation Automation application in SAP Cloud ALM.
In the Health Monitoring we can visualize the health of cloud services and systems to identify disruptions or degradations of service(s). To do this we perform regular application health checks for SAP cloud services to check statuses of components, connectivity, certificates, resources and so on.
Because metrics are collected regularly, we can also analyze services and systems health regarding to the history, including trends and usage metrics.
On Overview page we can see the health of our services that we have in scope and in favorites grouped by the service types that are displayed.
Health of a service is defined by a percentage, which also determines it’s rating color. It provides us status overview for all connected managed services and systems. Health percentage usually indicates to the overall health of service or system.
For SAP Cloud ALM self-monitoring the monitoring is automatically activated for a tenant. It monitors the metrics like SLIS import job, number of cloud services and systems, number of endpoints for the SAP Cloud ALM use cases. Reporting is available for all metrics.
For managed services and systems have focuses on metrics related to the technical health of the underlying systems and services. To use Health Monitoring for managed services and systems we may need to configure it ourselves.
For ABAP systems we can see information about number of shutdowns, processes running, users on the system, response time, CPU utilization on our hosts, memory utilization on our hosts.
For cloud services like Integration Suite, we see information about queues which are used, how many messages there are in a queue.
Conclusion
We can use Health Monitoring to monitor managed ABAP systems, cloud services: SAP Integration Suite (Cloud Integration) and SAP Intelligent Robotics Process Automation and most importantly for self-monitoring for SAP Cloud ALM itself.
With Health Monitoring we get insight into the different use cases of Cloud ALM to make sure that everything is running fine. It helps us to determine if we have issues in SAP Cloud ALM other use-cases, for example to make sure data collectors are running or experiencing an issue.
Integration to the cloud services gives us insights about queue usage in Integration Suite and also about job distributions of RPA service.
Monitoring of the managed ABAP systems provides us with system monitoring capabilities which gives us insights in-depth on technical level.