SAP Basis Monitoring

SAP BASIS MONITORING -- SAP Basis is the systems administration of SAP software applications. SAP software applications are inter-enterprise applications used primarily by large businesses to manage data. These systems manage financial and asset data, cost accounting, and help manage operations, materials and plants. For example, SAP software is often used to analyze same store sales or clinical drug trials. Proactive monitoring of the SAP systems, will help to understand issues in advance & helps us to take corrective actions and  thus will lead to lesser downtime of the systems, improving profitability of the business organisation.

Enterprises must develop a security strategy to ensure a secure and functional SAP   system.   A   business   critical   application   like   SAP   needs   continuous monitoring and improvement of its security features. Monitoring can be focused on ABAP stack(including database checks), Java Stack and Oslevel checks.

1. Process Overview SAP Monitoring
This transaction code will be useful to view the processes that are running currently in an sap insance. In this view you can check whether there are free workprocesses to execute the processes. If all the workprocesses are in running state and no work process is idle it means that wait times will increase for the processes that are waiting in the dispatcher queue leading to performance degradation. If you find that there are no free workprocceses for maximum times that you may consider, increasing the number of workprocesses.

2. Global process overview SAP
This transaction code will be useful to view the processes that are running across all instances/application servers of a SAP system. Similar to SM50 checks can be done in this transaction as well.

3. Application servers status
This transaction code will be useful to view all the hostnames and application servers status. If any application server is down, the same can be identified using status of the server column. We can also figure out different Message types (Dialog, Batch, Update, Upd2, Spool, ICM etc) configured for the respective servers.

4. Lock entry list
This transaction code will be useful to view all the sap locks that are present in the system. As part of monitoring, we need to look for any old sap locks that are more than 1 day. If any such locks, we need to analyse the reason for that lock for such longer duration and take actions accordingly. A lock can be set for such a long duration due to a long running background job or a lock is not released due to an application error or a program terminated abruptly but lock not released etc.

5. ABAP Dumps
This transaction code will be useful to view all the abap dumps that have occured in the system on a given day. As part of daily monitoring, it is the responsibility of the basis administrator to analyse the dumps and take necessary actions to avoid issues.
Some of the examples of abap dumps are timeout issue, database space issue, spool overflow issue etc.

6. System log
This transaction is useful to view the log of the sap system for various operations. This log will be very useful to identify various issue in advance and to take necessary measures. System log is the place to check out for any timeout, network issues, database space issues, message server issues, spool overflow, locktable overflow etc issues.

7. Update Requests overview
This transaction is useful to figure the status of update system. Incase an update is inactive we can figure out the same from this transaction and necessary action can be taken and update can be activated again.

8. Tune summary
This transaction will be used to monitor :
- Buffer statistics like hitratio, swaps, db access details, size of buffer and free size of buffer etc.
- Important statistics related to  Roll area, Page area, Extended memory and heap memory
- Call statistics like select, insert, update and delete
As a basis administrator, it is our responsibility to ensure there is more hit ratio for the buffers and less swaps to ensure efficient performance of the sap system. In case you see there are more swaps and less hit ratios for most of the buffers, then tuning buffers to be carried out to ensure optimal performance.

9. Backup logs
This transaction is useful to check the details of    last successful backup
    overview of database backups ( Success / failure of backup with log details)
    Archiving directory status (Free space of oraarch )
    Overview of redolog files ( Number of redologs that are not yet backed up)
    overview of redolog backups (Success / failure of backup with log details)