Easily monitor your SAP ABAP platform and user experience with Dynatrace (GA)

Having released this functionality in a Preview Release back in May 2019, we’re now happy to announce the General Availability of our SAP ABAP monitoring extension. This extends Dynatrace visibility into SAP ABAP performance from the infrastructure and ABAP application platform perspective.

Why SAP ABAP platform monitoring in Dynatrace?

SAP estimates that 80% of all worldwide business transactions touch SAP systems in some form. As of today, the SAP ABAP application server remains the central component of the SAP ERP solution. While depth of custom ABAP code monitoring is available from SAP Solution Manager and some specialist vendors, Dynatrace provides an AI-powered, unique type of monitoring of the ABAP platform for Operations teams:

• Non-SAP Operations engineers need assurance that the most critical enterprise application their infrastructure is hosting is performing as expected. They need to understand basic SAP performance counters and to have a common dialog platform with the SAP Basis team.
• The SAP Basis team needs a comprehensive picture of infrastructure performance and dependencies that determine their SAP system’s performance.

What is ABAP platform monitoring?

The ABAP platform monitoring solution is based on the remote monitoring approach and so relies on a Dynatrace ActiveGate extension:

• No agent installation on SAP servers is required.
• No ABAP code instrumentation or injection is performed.
• Monitoring is purely remote and implemented using public SAP ABAP interfaces.

The Dynatrace ActiveGate extension queries SAP servers for key performance counters. Collected metrics are analyzed in Dynatrace, using the SAP expert community’s established best-practice advice on ABAP platform health indicators, including response time breakdowns of the response times between ABAP-specific application server activities, tasks, and database interaction.

What you get from Dynatrace SAP ABAP platform monitoring

ABAP platform performance characterization

Dynatrace monitors and analyzes a small, handpicked number of SAP ABAP performance counters. These counters characterize base ABAP platform activities and their performance:

• ABAP server activity: Number of dialog steps and users served.
• Response time of the server, overall and split by the various task types that the server performs, like serving interactive GUI users, machine-to-machine RFC calls, print jobs, and background database updates.
• SAP database performance: Query response time, percentage of time spent in the database, and the number of database calls executed by the SAP server.
• Task time breakdown: Time spent in CPU, the database, and application server queues when serving a dialog response back to the user.
• Performance characteristics: Based on SAP advertised best practices for the percentage of task time spent in specific activities—performance metrics drive custom events that highlight periods of task execution bottlenecks.

Platform activity and performance is reported individually for each monitored SAP ABAP server.

SAP technology and process awareness

SAP process awareness and dependency monitoring are enabled by OneAgent, not by the ActiveGate ABAP platform monitoring extension. They are optional and require OneAgent installation on AS ABAP servers and other servers from the SAP landscape. SAP monitoring in Dynatrace is greatly enhanced by SAP process awareness and dependency monitoring. It’s therefore recommended that you deploy Dynatrace OneAgent on all SAP landscape servers.

When OneAgent is (optionally) installed on SAP servers, it recognizes SAP processes running on the servers and reports these under the same SAP technology group as the extension. With OneAgent added to SAP monitoring, Dynatrace can surface topological dependencies of the SAP and its connected systems and processes:

• Horizontal process-to-process and host-to-host dependencies characterize how SAP depends on other IT landscape systems, such as Citrix to deliver the SAP GUI to end users.
• Vertical infrastructure dependencies characterize how SAP depends on virtual and physical infrastructure performance.

Combined views enable IT Operations and SAP Basis teams to start with the same base for troubleshooting SAP performance bottlenecks and planning for future growth.

Deployment and support

The SAP ABAP platform ActiveGate extension is developed by Dynatrace and is easy to deploy—see our documentation for details.

Prerequisites

Prerequisites include remote access to the SAP ABAP server over RFC, with users permitted to execute standard monitoring functions:

• SAP Netweaver ABAP release 7.31+
• Dynatrace with ActiveGate release 1.167+
• SAP JCo library installed on the ActiveGate (download JCo from SAP)
• SAP ABAP platform monitoring requires remote access to the SAP application server (AS ABAP) over the RFC protocol, with user credentials to execute several monitoring functions. See Dynatrace documentation for details.

Interested in extending Dynatrace to monitor SAP ABAP?

The quickest way to get started is by contacting a Dynatrace ONE product specialist. Just select the chat button in the upper-right corner of the Dynatrace menu bar.