SAP HANA is an industry-leading Next-Gen platform enabling businesses to take their data management to the next level. It has gained significant ground since its launch ten years ago. Now, after a decade on the market, over 7,000 companies are using the platform, with the biggest contribution from the United States software sector.[i] This accounts for a major sector of the enterprise-level workloads. With so many business-critical transactions on the line, it is crucial to ensure the efficiency, stability, and security of your SAP landscape.
No system is a self-contained entity. They require maintenance and monitoring to ensure everything continues to run smoothly. Traditional monitoring strategies use numerous tools to achieve visibility, which increases the complexity of any system’s maintenance. Moreover, many of SAP’s diagnostic tools are reactive, identifying issues as they arise. It can be helpful to supplement these tools and strategies with proactive monitoring to increase efficiency and maximize database uptime.
The Benefits of Proactive Monitoring
With proactive monitoring strategies, companies gain greater visibility into the health and development of their database landscape. This means watching for potential problems before they develop into critical issues. It also enables companies to schedule critical maintenance, upgrades, and proactive resolutions during optimal windows to minimize downtime. Supplement your maintenance strategy with proactive monitoring to prevent outages, enhance business continuity, and increase end-user satisfaction.
What Does Proactive Monitoring Look Like?
Proactive monitoring means going through a regular set of daily steps to check the system’s status and ensure that your database environments are working optimally. This involves checking through log files, tables, and indexes, and even performing specific queries. Any potential problems or anomalies in the day’s workload are quickly found and resolved. Some examples of these monitoring steps are as follows.
- Checking the tablespace to make sure there is enough memory
- Identifying and resolving errors stuck in the queues
- Monitoring batch jobs, identifying job status, and further research of canceled jobs
- Identifying terminated spool requests and researching cause and resolution
- Locating ABAP runtime errors and finding the cause
- Checking lock statistics and locating and removing any unreleased locks
- Checking CPU utilization
- Verifying backup history and status
Proactive monitoring involves first identifying the problem or irregularity and then taking steps to resolve it as needed. This also includes further investigating the cause of the issue. Once identified, the appropriate steps can be taken according to SAP best practices. This could include clearing an unreleased lock, or it may involve adding new datafiles ahead of increasing memory usage to prevent an end-user lockout. Proactive monitoring can be accomplished by in-house DBAs, or through a database monitoring service. With that being said, utilizing a monitoring service ensures that your SAP HANA environments are expertly and efficiently monitored, freeing up your DBA or IT team to handle more high-level tasks.
Proactive monitoring can help ensure your SAP landscapes and SAP HANA database environments are optimized daily and continue running smoothly. Most critical issues are really many small issues building up and causing catastrophic failures. When this happens, it can be difficult to quickly identify and resolve these problems because they are so pixilated. Make sure to avoid lapses in performance and efficiency, or even unscheduled outages, by keeping ahead of the problem.
[i] Bansal, Himani. “Top Companies Using SAP HANA.” Pub: Apr. 15, 2019. Accessed: Dec. 19, 2020.