SAP HANA Monitoring – The Basics

What it is and what is does for me? What do I have to look for?

If you are responsible for SAP system monitoring, this is the blog post for you.

SAP HANA is a new in-memory database available as an SAP option. It is the fastest way to process and analyze business data.

SAP HANA replaces SAP BW as the data processing system for SAP NetWeaver and is available in different sizes. SAP HANA is a component of SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence.

Just like for the other SAP components, it is important to have a good understanding about the behavior of SAP HANA I learnt a lot from sites like https://www.avantra.com/sap-hana-monitoring and this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfutgYBK2J0.

Using the SDO Browser you can monitor SAP HANA as well as get the following information:

• Metadata
• Statistics
• Dynamic information about the cache
• Information about the system
• Information about the usage of CPU, Memory, Storage, etc.

What is SAP HANA monitoring?

SAP HANA monitoring refers to the ability to monitor the health of the SAP HANA system in real time. SAP HANA monitoring involves three main components: the SAP HANA application, the SAP HANA database, and the operating system (OS) on which the SAP HANA database runs.

Why is SAP HANA monitoring important?

SAP HANA is a high-availability, real-time enterprise database that supports real-time business applications. To ensure a high level of business continuity, it is important to monitor the SAP HANA database and the OS to detect any issues early on.

What are the good things about SAP HANA monitoring?

Because it can be used to monitor any other system, it is very flexible.

• It can be integrated with other systems.
• It is a high performance monitoring solution.
• It can help you to monitor your business without the cost of on-premise software.

What are the bad things about SAP HANA monitoring?

Well, I will try to strike a balance here: there are a number of things that we have to deal with when we monitor SAP HANA.

First of all, the SAP HANA database is a relational database. And it is a relational database that maybe running on a standard x86 server. So this means, that we have to deal with the fact, that the SAP HANA database is a standard database; it is not a SAP-only database.

This brings with it a number of challenges, such as:

• Performance monitoring – because the database is a standard database, we have to use standard monitoring tools.
• User and configuration management – because the database is a standard database, we have to use standard tools for user and configuration management.
• We need to use standard software to monitor the database.
• We need to use standard tools to manage the users that are accessing the database.

So there is a number of things that we have to have in place to monitor SAP HANA.

Second thing is that – as I said earlier – SAP HANA is a relational database running on x86 hardware. And this means that we have to have the x86-tools on our server.

And this is actually a very important thing to note when you are planning to monitor an SAP HANA instance: you have to monitor the SAP HANA instance, but you also have to monitor the SAP HANA host, because the SAP HANA host is usually an x86 server which is running a lot of other software and databases on it. So you have to make sure that your monitoring solution supports monitoring of non-SAP software on an SAP HANA server.

Fortunately, most of the monitoring tools do have support for this, but you need to make sure that you check the monitoring tool you want to use to make sure that it does support monitoring of non-SAP software on an SAP HANA host.