SAP Host Agent Monitoring

Background

In the standard SAP environment, SAP Host Agent is used for monitoring operating systems, databases, system instance control, and SAP applications. In IT-Conductor, SAP Host Agent monitoring is used to provide an additional layer of monitoring to cover monitoring services like Access Points, Enqueue/Locks, Process States including message servers, web dispatcher, gateway, and more.

We can easily monitor the status and availability of the services and applications in real time to determine if the system and its components are up and running and get notified in case of any failure. The state and the status for both App Server and Host Agent level are also available, this allows checking the availability of the database and the application server.

On This Page

How to Add a New SAP Host Agent for Monitoring

1.From the IT-Conductor Dashboard menu, navigate to Administrator.

Figure 1: IT-Conductor Dashboard

2. Scroll down, locate SAP Host Agents, and click on the “+” icon to create a new system.

Figure 2: SAP Host Agents Section

3. Fill in the necessary configuration information as required and click on the “+” icon.

Figure 3: Create a new SAP Host Agent

4. A dialog pop-up confirming the entry has been created will appear. Click OK.

5. The next page is to associate a monitoring account that the host agent allows to connect services.

Figure 5-a: Association of the Host Agent to the Application

Click OK.

Figure 5-b: Association Confirmation

This is will add the configuration for monitoring the host agent.

How to Monitor Different Monitoring Services in SAP Host Agent

IT-Conductor™ helps you to associate monitoring information easier through the expandable service grid.

1. On the main dashboard, in the SAP System Systems section in the service grid, navigate to the system ID created.

Figure 6: Accessing SAP System in the Service Grid

2. This will be directed to the page where the hierarchy of the service monitoring is. The particular association that IT-Conductor can provide is to associate the host agent with the application server.

Click on the system ID and navigate to the ABAP Central Services (ASCS), which is the core SAP application service. You will be able to see Access Points, Enqueue, and Processes servers where most of the monitoring will take place.

Figure 8: Sample of Monitoring Services

• Access points - composed of host and port information for the HTTPS protocol. This is being used to check and discover if the access port is active.

• Enqueue - also known as the Lock server, an SAP system component that manages the Lock Tables. The table is locked to prevent different modifications of records at the same time and ensure data consistency.

• Process States - tells the status of whether the service is doing something or not. Since this is a central services server, different servers such as messaging, disp+work, and gateway servers are available.

This shows that the host being monitored underneath this infrastructure is automatically associated so that you can get the details of the actual operating system performance. All these services are being monitored automatically.

Setting Up Accounts for SAP Host Agent Monitoring

On Microsoft Windows, we recommend using a single domain user for all host agents.

The user account(s) must be a member of:

• On Linux/Unix: sapsys group

• On Windows: SAP_LocalAdmin group

IT-Conductor uses web services provided by the SAP host agent which are protected and can only be used by an authenticated caller (see SAP Note 927637). To authorize users to access SAP host agent services the following need to be performed for all hosts to be monitored, after ensuring the executable DIR_EXECUTABLE/sapuxuserchk has 4750 permission (on Linux/Unix).

For ALL instances on Host, open the following file:

1. On Linux/Unix: /usr/sap/hostctrl/exe/host_profile
   On Microsoft Windows: C:\Program Files\SAP\hostctrl\exe\host_profile

2. Add the following parameter: service/admin_users

3. Add admin users as parameter values separated by a blank space (for example service/admin_users =<user1> <user2> <user3>)
   On Unix: service/admin_users = <user1> <user2>
   On Windows: service/admin_users = [domain\]<user1> [domain\]<user2>
   Save.

4. Restart SAP Host Agent with "/usr/sap/hostctrl/exe/saphostexec -restart" or "C:\Program Files\SAP\hostctrl\exe\saphostexec.exe -restart"

5. Log on with the OS user to be checked and execute "sapcontrol -prot GSOAP_HTTP -nr -user "<User name>" "<User password>" -function AccessCheck <function>"
   <function> we use include:

   • GetAccessPointList

   • GetProcessList

   • GetEnvironment

   • GetInstanceProperties

   • ABAPGetWPTable

   • GetSystemInstanceList

   • GetQueueStatistic

   • GetAlertTree

   • GetAlerts

   • EnqGetStatistic

   • EnqGetLockTable

   • ICMGetProxyConnectionList

   • ICMGetCacheEntries

   • ICMGetThreadList

   • WebDispGetServerList

   • WebDispGetGroupList

   • WebDispGetVirtHostList

For the SAP Instance ONLY (Recommended), open the following file:

1. Open the SAP instance profile $(DIR_INSTALL)/profile/DEFAULT.PFL

2. Add the following parameters: 

       3. As root user: Restart the relevant "sapstartsrv" for the sap instance using: 'systemctl restart sapinit' which requires a SAP downtime, so please make sure you can do it during maintenance.

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