Keeping your environment monitored and healthy over time is still critical as the users’ behaviors change and developers build new and innovative visualizations on data that will continue to push and tax your environment. With that, keep in mind that your best practices will never be the same from year to year. Sure, many will carry forward, but if your best practices are not evolving, you are doomed. Here are a few things to consider in monitoring your environment for better-assured success:
왘 Don’t make your alerts too “noisy.” All noisy alerts accomplish is to annoy peo-ple, and they end up ignoring them. Then when something really does go wrong, nobody knows about it because the alert was lost in the sea of noise.
This is very similar to crying “Wolf.” Make sure your alerts fire in a way that people know something serious is going on. Don’t inundate your operators with a bajillion meaningless alerts.
왘 Make sure that you can get critical alerts for critical servers from your mobile device. A critical alert that goes to your corporate email inbox late on Saturday night won’t do you a lick of good if you can’t see it until Monday morning once the business day has begun.
왘 Make sure your critical alerts are also going to a backup. Humans get sick or go away on vacation, and it just isn’t feasible to think that only one person should be getting all of the server alerts.
왘 If your company has a 24x7 operations center or help desk, make sure your critical alerts get to them, too. And document as much as possible about what these alerts mean and what those tier 1 operators should try first before calling and waking you up.
왘 Don’t try to monitor the whole world at once. Start with your critical services and processes, and iron those out. Monitoring is a work in progress, some-times for several months until you get the right mix that gets you the visibility you need.
왘 Conduct a review of your monitoring plan quarterly. Look at what is triggering and what isn’t. If you have useless alerts or watch lists, get rid of them. Stick to what is meaningful, and don’t be afraid to change the plan as your system’s and company’s needs evolve.
왘 Audit and report with frequency. Do not fire it up and forget it. Aside from third-party tools that report on content within the environment, it is the only SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0 mechanism that allows you to analyze the behav-iors of users within your environment.
While you finish this chapter and realize that SAP has added some very cool intra-application monitoring to SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0, it is critical that you as the caretaker of this platform should not rely solely on an application monitoring platform that relies on itself to be up and running to function. What do we mean by that? Monitoring in SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0 is dependent on the SIA and the CMS, processes that on their own are capable of failure prior to any other ser-vice running your cluster that you are hoping to monitor. What are you monitor-ing if, unbeknownst to you, your SIA crashes and you didn’t follow our advice on fault tolerance? Whoops. You must get engaged and rely on other enterprise monitoring solutions to maintain availability in your SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0 platform.
Centralized Logging and Monitoring
Most organizations should have some type of enterprise monitoring solution in place. These types of platforms have the capability of monitoring many servers in your organization’s data center. They are vendor agnostic. They can monitor sys-tems running Windows, UNIX, Linux, and even Mac OS. So how is this relevant?
They don’t depend on any SAP BusinessObjects service to be available to monitor your system. Let’s slice and dice that.
왘 Servicelevelmonitoring
Since the invention of the SIA, monitoring individual servers for up time has become more challenging. The SIA is in charge of spinning up individual serv-ers and controls their up and down time. Should the SIA itself be monitored?
Absolutely. Can your enterprise monitoring tools watch for the presence of a CMS service where it is expected? You bet.
왘 Performancemonitoring
Overall system utilization is a KPI that should not go unchecked. Whether you are using beefy physical servers or have virtualized parts of your cluster, these tools allow you to keep an eye on CPU utilization at an individual core level, but then also at an aggregate on the entire box. You can watch memory utiliza-tion over time to understand the peaks and valleys in the memory-hungry SAP
Summary 7.9
BusinessObjects BI 4.0 platform throughout the online and offline day. Lastly, outliers like disk I/O and network capacity can be watched to look for signifi-cant utilization.
Know, however, that definition of thresholds for when capacity is being reached may be out of your league. Each organization should already have stan-dards in place to define what acceptable and maximum utilization look like.
This is yet another reason to be buddies with your system administrator and capacity planning types, as they hold the keys to this information.
왘 Applicationavailability
There is little you can do without custom code like the probes do to monitor whether SAP BusinessObjects is working. But at a minimum, using technolo-gies like hardware load balancers gives you the ability to evaluate the availabil-ity of your web tier. If you believe that Tomcat or WebSphere is unfailing, you’ve got another thing coming. Load balancers redistribute HTTP traffic between servers. They then by their nature evaluate whether the server is alive so they can reallocate traffic in the event of a failure. This is a key warning if a box is going or has gone down.
As it pertains to SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0, the probes are the only other mechanism that is going to give you any type of environmental health moni-toring that you can rely on. But we cannot impress enough the value of a clus-ter. Avoid putting all your eggs in one basket if at all possible.
Achieving a successful monitoring strategy takes work. Make nice with the sys-tem administrator and capacity planners in your organization to understand what enterprise monitoring tools have been acquired (assuming they are third-party vendors) and collaborate on that monitoring strategy to keep an eye on your envi-ronment as it gets used and grows up into a more mature/used platform.
7.9 Summary
The heart and soul of monitoring is that you want to be aware of problems in your system before your users are. Users who see error messages tend to panic, and panic is never a good thing.
SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0 has a powerful, built-in monitoring engine to help you in your administrative cause. You can use metrics to build up a watch list that
will send you an alert when the criteria are met for your caution or danger rules.
You can have your alert notifications sent to your email address, or simply consume them in the BI Launch Pad.
The probes are finally an official part of the product, and you can use them to sim-ulate user activities such as logging in and refreshing reports. Schedule the probes to run on a regular basis, and you can keep tabs on critical customer touch-points.
You can also use probe runtimes as trend data to see if certain operations are speeding up or slowing down over time.
Index
Adaptive Job Server, 155, 168 Adaptive Processing Server, 166, 168 Add node, 130
Application programming interface (API), 41 Application tier, 41, 137, 147
APPLICATION_TYPE, 76 Assert, 375
Audit properties, 77 AUDIT_DETAIL, 72 AUDIT_EVENT, 70
Auditor, 43, 44, 69, 104, 110, 127, 147, 271 enabling, 341 Cascading Style Sheets 씮 CSS Caution rule, 315
creating, 315 ccm.sh, 137
Central Management Console 씮 CMC Central Management Server 씮 CMS Change and Transport System, 275 Character large object (CLOB), 72 Client tools, 124
clientsettings.properties, 420 Cloning servers, 142
Cluster key, 107, 120, 133, 223 Clustering, 129
CMC, 109, 125, 129, 136
CMS, 43, 44, 104, 107, 110, 147, 152, 271 cluster, 118, 269, 292, 295, 426 database, 127, 263
name, 261 port, 119, 122, 132
Comma-separated values 씮 CSV Common semantic layer 씮 CSL Complete upgrade, 260
Cryptographic keys, 226 Crystal Reports Job Service, 156 CSL, 20, 21
CSS, 442, 447, 450 CSV, 23
CTS settings, 275 CUID, 268
Custom, 106, 114, 127, 128 Custom access levels, 209
Data Federation Administration Tool, 175 Data Federation Query Engine, 175 Data Federation Service, 170, 174 Data Federator, 118, 173 Database tier, 41, 143 Debugging, 429 Decentralized, 126 default.css, 449
Delegated administration, 212, 217, 261 Deleting nodes, 136
Demilitarized zone (DMZ), 429 Denied, 196
Dependencies, 267, 269, 285 Deployment Level Metrics box, 302 Desktop Intelligence, 23, 264 Domain name systems (DNS), 446 DSL Bridge Service, 169
Expand, 106, 114, 127, 128 Expert users, 58 Full migration, 106, 114, 259
G
General properties, 438 Granted, 196
Graphical view of BI landscape box, 302
H
High availability, 144 History, 289, 291
Index
Horizontal scaling, 129 HTTP listening port, 108
I
Images, 441
Import Wizard, 257, 266, 269 Incremental migration, 264 Java Web Application Server, 106 Job settings, 275, 277
K
KPI Status box, 301
L
Lifecycle Manager, 106, 117, 257, 258, 272 Lifecycle Manager Server, 171
Linux, 43, 103, 137, 146, 148, 417 Live to Live, 260
O
checking with Query Builder, 331 Crystal Reports Service, 326 InfoView, 328
Interactive Analysis, 329 Start Stop Servers, 330 Probes, 323
Product Availability Matrix 씮 PAM Product keycode, 112
Production, 47 Promote, 286, 289
Promotion job, 271, 281, 283, 285 Promotion management, 273 Query as a Web Service, 32 Query Panel, 24
Replication list, 292, 293, 295 Replication Service, 291
Index
S
sa, 121, 132 Sandbox, 45
SAP Application Performance Standard, 52 SAP BEx Analyzer, 35
SAP BusinessObjects Analysis, 35
SAP BusinessObjects BI4 Sizing Estimator, 60 SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards, 31, 32, 443
Server, 171
SAP BusinessObjects Mobile, 37, 418 Server, 429
SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence, 23, 438 document summary, 441
Processing Server, 158 Report, 426
SAP Community Network, 359, 429 SAP Crystal Reports, 27, 433
Server, 170
SAP Crystal Reports 2011, 27 Processing Server, 161
SAP Crystal Reports Enterprise, 30 Processing Server, 160
SAP HANA, 35, 36 SAP Help Portal, 353 SAP NetWeaver, 452
SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator, 36 SAP Quick Sizer, 56, 102
SAP Service Marketplace, 101, 104, 105 SAP Solution Manager, 109, 122 SAP Support Portal, 357 SAPS, 52, 53
SDK, 27, 431, 452, 454 Secure Socket Layer 씮 SSL Security, 193
settings, 287
Server Intelligence Agent 씮 SIA SERVER_CUID, 70
SERVER_PROCESS, 75 Servers panel, 139 Service category, 140
Service level agreement (SLA), 144 Service-oriented architecture (SOA), 40
Software Development Kit 씮 SDK Solaris, 148
Style sheet, 434, 441, 449
Subversion, 106, 108, 117, 122, 270 Success, 290
sup.properties, 423
Sybase Unwired Platform, 417, 419, 423 Symbian, 39, 417
Throttle and Notification screen, 318 Tomcat, 106, 117, 146, 420, 451 Total users, 43
U
Universe, 19, 264 UNIX, 43, 103, 146, 148 UNV, 20
UNX, 20
Upgrade, 102, 260, 386
Upgrade Management Tool, 257, 258 Usability, 443
Web Application Server configuration, 164 Web Intelligence Rich Client, 23
Web tier, 41, 106, 114, 128, 129, 137, 143,
Xcelsius 씮 SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards
Z
Zen, 39