There are many ways to install and operate your SAP HANA environments on premise. However, creating a daily, weekly, and monthly standard operating procedure (SOP) is a good way to ensure that the system stays well tuned and that potential issues are avoided. This is also known as the daily operations handbook. I explain what the different landscape options are and how you can start creating your own SOP for your data center.

The first decision you have to make when setting up your data center for your SAP HANA environments is to decide if you are going to place it on premise, as part of an outsourcing agreement, or in the cloud. The on-premise approach is currently the most common. It basically means that you will have to integrate the hardware into your current data center and possibly into an off-site data center if you are implementing a high-availability (HA) solution.

A major consideration for the on-premise approach would be to make sure that your hardware fits into your existing chassis, racks, power outlets, cooling plan, and the outlay of your data center. For example, many are not aware that some of the larger SAP HANA systems, such as Lenovo’s x3850 x6, require a four-rack unit (U) height in a data center, but if you use Lenovo’s x3950 x6, you need to double that size requirement (since that is basically two stacked 3850s). Other products, such as Cisco’s C880 M4 server, require a 10U height. Therefore, it is very important to decide what hardware deployment options you are going with. As of September 2015, the most common forms of certified hardware are shown in Figure 1 and described in Table 1.

Figure 1

Common SAP HANA hardware platforms for on-premise deployment

Table 1

Characteristics of the certified SAP HANA hardware options

Customer SAP HANA Admin and Support Responsibilities

As you start with your plan to write an SOP, it is important that you be aware of the normal support, install, and monitoring roles, as well as the responsibilities of SAP, your hardware vendor, and your own team. The normal support responsibilities can be summarized as shown in Table 2.

It is important to note that the responsibilities as outlined in Table 2 are based on an on-premise installation of SAP HANA and that no other support agreements are made with the hardware vendor, a cloud vendor, or outsourcing partners. Depending on how you write your support agreement with these vendors, some or all of the customer responsibilities may be assumed by these partners. The trick to making sure of what you are responsible for is to specify these activities in a service level agreement (SLA) if you are using other vendors to support your systems and landscapes.

There are also different cloud options that some companies might consider. For each of these options the responsibilities of the customer are significantly different. First, you can have your SAP HANA system and applications delivered as a software as a service (SaaS). Under this offering you can get software applications such as SAP Business Suite, SAP Business Warehouse (BW), and SAP Rapid Deployment solutions (RDS) as SaaS SAP HANA cloud solutions from several vendors who then take over all customer responsibilities for daily monitoring, support, and maintenance.

Another option is the platform as a service (PaaS). This is normally provided as a solution in which the database, operating system, connectivity, and hardware are supported by a cloud vendor, but daily operations and monitoring of the application are the customer’s responsibilities. Finally, the lowest level of cloud offerings is known as infrastructure as a service (IaaS). As the name implies, you are normally responsible for all tasks as shown in Table 2, except the hardware maintenance, which is then hosted in the cloud.

However, in this article I assume that the support is for an on-premise implementation; that the customer is assuming the normal support, maintenance, and monitoring roles; and that a cloud solution is not in place.

System Versus Landscape Administration

There are several tools and procedures that should be developed that are different based on a system or landscape administration perspective. For example, for system administration you should leverage SAP’s HANA Administration Guide that can be downloaded at https://help.sap.com/hana/sap_hana_administration_guide_en.pdf. This guide is maintained and updated by SAP on a release basis. It shows you how to use the SAP HANA cockpit (a Fiori launchpad application) and SAP HANA studio for the main system administration, the core functions of high-availability and disaster recovery, scalability (up and out), and security administration. It also details how to manage and monitor applications for data provisioning and custom applications built in the SAP HANA Extended Services (XS) framework.

You can also monitor the system through the database (DBA) cockpit in Solution Manager and leverage the Trouble Shooting and Performance Analysis Guide from SAP (located at https://help.sap.com/hana/sap_hana_troubleshooting_and_performance_analysis_guide_en.pdf) when issues arise. However, from a landscape administration perspective, you leverage the Technical Operations Manual from SAP (located at https://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-60369) and the DB control center, as well as any respective application support for the systems you might be running. So, when you start developing your SOP or daily operating handbook, you should start by familiarizing yourself with these very important documents and tools and think about system administration as different from landscape administration. Table 3 shows the key SAP resources for SAP HANA system and landscape administration.

SAP HANA System Monitoring Tools and Education

You can also choose one or more ways to perform your system monitoring. For example, you can monitor system databases and also tenant databases (in MCOD/MCOS) by directly connecting to a database using the SAP HANA cockpit, the DBA Cockpit in Solution Manager, or through regular SAP HANA studio.

In SAP HANA studio in the administration perspective, you get access to most database and system information. There are several tabs that displays landscape, alerts (automatic scheduled monitoring jobs), performance statistics, disk volume information, configuration settings, overall system information, diagnostic files, and configuration of traces and trace files (Figure 2).

Figure 2

The SAP HANA studio administration console perspective

Since Support Package Stack 9 of SAP HANA in late 2014, the enhanced SAP HANA cockpit is now a very interesting way to get access to a simple web-based monitoring application that shows you key statuses of your SAP HANA systems and databases. As mentioned before, the SAP HANA cockpit is basically a Fiori launchpad site that you can also customize to show only the items you are interested in for daily operation monitoring (Figure 3).

Figure 3

Administration with the SAP HANA cockpit in Fiori

The customization of this application is a simple click-and-drag of the tiles (much like on your cell phone). You can also choose the refresh rate of the information in the SAP HANA cockpit. The application can run on a web browser and is therefore mobile and simple to deploy. The SAP HANA cockpit also has a Manage Databases app that allows you to monitor single and multi-tenant databases in SAP HANA.

As you click each of these tiles, a vast array of detail information is provided for your in-depth analysis and system monitoring. However, it is important to note that while the SAP HANA cockpit supports core administration of tenant databases (i.e., MCOS), SAP HANA studio and some command-line tools may still be required for key tasks for tenant databases. Frankly, the only minor drawback with the SAP HANA cockpit is that it may require additional licenses depending on what you bought with the initial license package.

At a higher level, the SAP Database Control Center (DCC) is also a Fiori application that allows you to monitor both SAP HANA and other types of databases from a central application. As you become more familiar with these tools, you probably will find it useful to start with one or two of these and choose the others as alternatives when you are stuck on a certain task. Most system administrators include SAP HANA studio and either the DBA or the SAP HANA cockpit for daily monitoring.

To start to learn about these tools, first download and study the guides outlined in Table 1. A five-day SAP course called HA-200 “SAP HANA - Installation & Operations” is available for experienced support staff as well as for beginners.

Solution Manager and Landscape Virtualization Management (LVM)Tools

Many of the tools used for system monitoring are also used for database monitoring. First, you can conduct many of the individual database admin functions through SAP HANA studio and the SAP HANA cockpit from a web browser. From there, you can make changes to the database system settings and also add users, privileges, and most standard database admin tasks. Also, just as you can for all SAP software, you can use Solution Manager for core monitoring, admin of multiple systems in your landscape, and as the backbone for Change and Transport System+ (CTS+) integration of transports between the systems in your landscape. Solution Manager can also be used to generate EarlyWatch reports periodically that show growth, use trends, and technical support information. You will also find the DBA Cockpit in Solution Manager (Figure 4). This tool allows you to monitor the SAP HANA database and exposes almost all the technical information you would otherwise find in the Administration Console perspective in SAP HANA studio.

Figure 4

SAP HANA Admin and monitoring with the DBA cockpit in Solution Manager

Solution Manager and the DBA Cockpit also support trace analysis, workload analysis, and exception analysis of SAP HANA databases. Most customers therefore find this tool invaluable when monitoring and managing SAP landscapes with both SAP HANA and other types of databases.

In addition to these tools, the LVM from SAP is also supported for SAP HANA (Figure 5). This tool allows you to conduct core operations of complex landscapes that are based on SAP HANA or non-SAP HANA servers. There is a standard edition of LVM that can be downloaded from SAP for free, and an Enterprise Edition equipped with more features requires a license before you can use it.

Figure 5

The LVM screen

When any of these administration and management tools are deployed, it is important that your support staff that is monitoring, maintaining, and operating an SAP HANA landscape have a good understanding of the capabilities of each of these.

Daily Operations SAP HANA Checklist

After you decide on your monitoring tool, download and study the available support documents in Table 3, and complete any of the other training methods you have selected, such as an SAP class, you are ready to start writing your SOP. The SOP should consist of daily operations, weekly jobs, and periodic upgrades and patches as supplied by SAP. In this section I look at the most common daily operations tasks that you will be doing.

While many prefer to have active or passive monitoring of systems, best practices are to have a combination of these. Passive monitoring usually means activating and scheduling some of the alerts available in SAP HANA studio. You can place thresholds on the alerts (i.e., when memory consumed exceeds a certain number of GB), and you can schedule how often the checks are performed on the database. When triggered, these alerts show up in the SAP HANA cockpit, DBA Cockpit, and SAP HANA studio in both detail and overview pages. Today, there are 74 standard alerts that come with the SAP HANA system (Figure 6).

Figure 6

SAP HANA alerts in SAP HANA studio

You can also set up email alerts if you have the system privilege CATALOG READ, the SELECT privilege on the _SYS_STATISTICS schema, and the system privilege INIFILE ADMIN. The first of these privileges is included in the standard SAP HANA role called MONITORING. This role can be assigned to non-system admin users. It allows other technical resources access to see what is happening inside the SAP HANA system without the ability to change anything.

There is also a list of historically executed alerts in SAP HANA studio, but be aware that this list is restricted to the last 1,000 occurrences from the last 30 days. Also, when an alert is triggered, a priority is assigned by the system. In general, there are four different priorities with different timing when action is recommended (Table 4).

There are also 10 different categories of alerts relating to availability, backup, configuration, CPU, diagnosis files, disk, memory, security, sessions, and system. Deciding when to schedule these alerts and when to monitor them is a critical task of the SAP HANA administrator. By activating and monitoring the recommended daily and intraday alerts through any of the tools outlined previously, you can detect any performance issues early.

To get started, take a look at Table 5 as the first step of your own tailored daily SAP HANA admin SOP. In this table you find all the available SAP HANA automated alerts, alert IDs (so that you can find them in SAP HANA studio), the suggested frequency when these alerts should be activated or monitored, descriptions, and SAP’s official recommendation on how to resolve any issues.

Table 5

Admin monitoring frequency, alert IDs, and SAP-recommended actions

Periodic and Active Monitoring

In addition to these passive alerts, you can also add active monitoring by the system administrator to start to predict when performance issues might arise. These active monitoring activities include tracking weekly or monthly increases in data files, CPU use, planned projects, memory consumption, and user activity. This data allows you to plan and budget resources for system upgrades, data archiving, near-line storage (NLS) implementations, and hardware changes.

In addition, it is imperative that you also monitor new security patches and software fixes available from SAP and determine if this is something that you should consider for rapid implementation, or you can bundle them into periodic upgrades, service packs, and patches on a monthly or quarterly basis. The list of tasks in Table 5 should get you started with the automatic checks, but you can also build your own additional monitoring process by accessing the system information in SAP HANA. This is available in the administrator perspective in SAP HANA studio under the System Information tab page (Figure 7) and is also mostly exposed in the SAP HANA cockpit and in the DBA Cockpit.

Figure 7

The System Information tab in SAP HANA studio

Periodic SOP Tasks for Keeping the SAP BW on SAP HANA System Smaller

In addition to the daily and periodic standard monitoring tasks, you might want to do an active monitoring of an SAP HANA system during a go-live of a new project, as well as during a hyper-care period shortly after new functionality has been added to the system. In this section I describe some useful tips that help you do active monitoring using available transactions in the SAP HANA system.

Since most SAP HANA systems are currently using SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) as an application (this will most likely change over time), I focus on keeping SAP BW 7.3 and 7.4 on SAP HANA systems as small as possible. However, some of the archiving tasks in this section also apply to a Business Suite on an SAP HANA system.

First, if you want to quickly get access to see the largest SAP HANA tables (and monitor their growth), you can use transaction code DB02. Using this transaction enables you to find the largest tables in memory and also their respective record counts. These tables and record counts are shown in Figure 8.

Figure 8

View large SAP HANA tables

In an SAP BW system there are also tables that are likely to grow faster than others. These include the application log tables BALHDR, BALHDRP, BALM, BALMP, BALDAT, BALC, and BAL_INDX as well as the tables for linking IDocs (IDOCREL and SRRELROLES) and the short dump table SNAP.

Other request administration data in SAP BW that you want to monitor includes data in the RSBMLOGPAR, RSBMLOGPAR_DTP, RSBMNODES, RSBMONMESS, RSBMONMESS_DTP, RSBMREQ_DTP, RSCRTDONE, RSDELDONE, RSHIEDONE, RSLDTDONE, RSMONFACT, RSMONICTAB, RSMONMESS, RSMONRQTAB, RSREQDONE, RSRULEDONE, RSSELDONE, RSTCPDONE, and RSUICDONE tables, as well as the Dictionary logs found in DDPRS. In this section I explain how to best manage these tables to keep the SAP HANA system as small as possible.

In addition to these tables you should also monitor the size of the SAP BW workbook table RSRWBSTORE and the SAP BW statistics data found in RSDDSTATAGGR, RSDDSTATAGGRDEF, RSDDSTATCOND, RSDDSTATDELE, RSDDSTATDM, RSDDSTATEVDATA, RSDDSTATHEADER, RSDDSTATINFO, RSDDSTATLOGGING, and RSDDSTATDTP. All these tables tend to grow rapidly in active systems, but keeping them small is rather simple. For example, to clean up the statistics entries in these tables, you can run the program RSDDSTAT_DATA_DELETE after you execute transaction code SE38 and then schedule the job to run periodically by executing transaction code SM36 (Figure 9). In general, it may be useful to keep 12 months of statistical data, so you don’t want to remove it all.

Figure 9

Deleting statistics entries over 365 days old using the RSDDSTAT_DATA_DELETE program

You should also monitor the size of the Data Transfer Process (DTP) error log in RSBERRORLOG, the process chain logs (RSPCINSTANCE), and the SAP BW batch run-time data (RSBATCHDATA). These logs contain numerous warnings and errors in transformation recordings. You can delete these periodically using RSBM_ERRORLOG_DELETE and schedule it to run to remove entries over 60/90 days old.

Furthermore, you can also keep your system small by periodically removing data in RSPCLOGCHAIN, RSPCPROCESSLOG, and table RSPCINSTANCET. This is done by using the RSPC_LOG_DELETE report after you execute transaction code SE38 (Figure 10).

Figure 10

RSPC_LOG_DELETE of process chain data in SAP BW

In addition to the tips mentioned above, to keep the application log tables small, you should use transaction code SM36 to schedule a job to run periodically. In the screen shown in Figure 11, click the Step button to define which program the job will run (pick SBAL_DELETE). After that, you can also choose a variant to decide how much data you want to keep. For example, in Figure 11 I delete case logs older than 60 days.

Figure 11

Cleaning SAP BW appplication log tables in SAP HANA

After this setup, you can then schedule the job to run periodically (Figure 12). This job proactively helps keep the memory use of the SAP HANA system smaller than it would be if all these application logs were not periodically cleaned.

Figure 12

Scheduling an archiving job to run periodically

You should also periodically archive IDocs to keep the SAP HANA system smaller. IDocs are used for communication between SAP BW and the source system. When SAP BW executes an InfoPackage for data extraction, a request IDocs, RSREQUEST, is sent to the source system’s application link enabling (ALE) inbox. The source system acknowledges the receipt of this IDoc by sending an info IDoc (RSINFO) back to the SAP BW system.

In addition the source system sends an IDoc with all the requested data using the message type (RSSEND). Therefore, these tables can grow fast over time. You should therefore consider archiving IDocs older than three to six months. You can do this by executing transaction code SARA and then clicking the Write button, as shown in Figure 13.

Figure 13

Keeping SAP HANA small by archiving IDocs

After you have selected the Maintain button, you then click the Attributes option and select RSSEND as the message type, as seen in Figure 14.

Figure 14

Select tables for IDocs archiving

Finally, you select the Created on line and pick the variable Current date – 30 days as seen in Figure 15. This archives all IDocs with a message type RSSEND that have a create date that is more than 30 days old. Naturally, you can select other retention periods in the variable selection (i.e., 60/90 days).

Figure 15

Maintaining the Created On filter dynamically to archive all entries older than 30, 60, or 90 days

Once, you complete the archiving of the IDocs with message type RSSEND, you can repeat the process in Figures 13, 14, and 15 to archive the other types of IDocs as well RSINFO and RSREQUEST.

Then you simply give the job a description and schedule the job to run periodically. However, it is important to note that your Basis team needs to periodically back up and delete the archiving file in the Directory folder. This is typically done annually. The archive administration transaction is also available in the Business Suite on the SAP HANA system.

In addition to the jobs and programs outlined above, you should also consider periodic clean-up of obsolete IDocs links. Links are written in the ALE and IDoc environments, resulting in entries in the IDOCREL and SRRELROLES tables. The links are required for IDoc document trace and ALE audit monitoring.

You can delete links in IDC8 and IDCA regularly (they are not required after the IDocs are posted). To do this, delete the links and execute transaction code SE38 and report RSRLDREL. Under the Selection mode, click Select using relationship type. Create a variant for the link types IDC8 and IDCA and then, under the Deletion Criterion, select Without existence check. Finally, as you did in Figure 13, (the regular IDoc removal), you can now create a dynamic end date variable. You use transaction code SM36 to schedule the job to run periodically. This helps you maintain a small SAP HANA system and keeps the SAP BW system much cleaner.

Furthermore, you can make the Request Administration data in SAP HANA smaller. While you should never delete entries in theses tables, you can archive them and reload old entries if necessary. Before you start this, you should make sure that the reports RSSTATMAN_CHECK_CONVERT_DTA and RSSTATMAN_CHECK_CONVERT_PSA have been executed in the ABAP editor transaction (SE38) at least once for all objects. You start by executing transaction code SARA and selecting the archiving object called BWREQARCH. Schedule this to run to archive entries that are more than 90 days old (Figure 16).

Figure 16

Periodic maintenance by archiving request administration data in SAP BW

In addition to these archiving jobs, you can also remove data in the Dictionary Logs. Basically, the DDPRS dictionary log table contains all activities that make any change on the Data Dictionary objects in SAP BW. This can grow quite large over time, and you might want to remove some of these log entries on an annual basis. To clean up these log entries, execute transaction code SE38 and run report RADPROTA. From here you simply select the DDPRS and the time period you want to delete, such as 02/11/2013 to the current date, as seen in Figure 17. Just make sure you execute the job as a background job.

Figure 17

Remove Dictionary Logs in SAP BW to reduce SAP HANA size

You also want to make sure that non-reportable tables that have no daily loads going into them have their memory cleansed. You do that by executing transaction code RSHDBMON using the load/unload the data options, or flag it for Early Unload (Figure 18). The last option allows SAP HANA to decide when the data should be unloaded (i.e., when the data is not accessed, or data is not loaded). This process allows you to keep your SAP HANA memory use smaller, while still having access to the data when needed.

Figure 18

Unload nonactive data from SAP HANA memory with RSHDBMON

Also, occasionally you need to clean up the short dump table SNAP in SAP BW. To do this execute transaction code ST22. In the screen that appears, click the Goto button and select Reorganize from the list of options in the drop-down menu (Figure 19). From here you can select the run-time errors you want to remove.

Figure 19

Periodic cleaning up of the short-dump table in SAP BW

For example, in Figure 20, I chose to remove all errors older than 90 days. To execute the job, simply select Reorganize again.

Figure 20

Selecting the time period for deleting records in the short-dump table SNAP

Finally, from a SAP HANA monitoring standpoint you may want to ensure that the delta merge is performed regularly. You can monitor this in the SAP HANA Admin perspective of Eclipse in SAP HANA studio (Figure 21). From here you can see each table in the schema of every host and see if memory merges are happening.

Figure 21

Monitoring delta merge processing in SAP HANA using SAP HANA studio

Administrating SAP HANA on a daily basis is a very interesting challenge. There are many technical aspects from hardware health, system connectivity, database performance, security, file management, backup, table management, memory consumption, disk utilization, and much more. It is therefore very important that you plan a structured support approach to SAP HANA and that tasks are scheduled in as automated a fashion as possible. Using checklists assures that you are not surprised by activities that can easily be addressed if they are monitored in a very organized fashion.

Dr. Bjarne Berg

Dr. Bjarne Berg is a Principal and the Tax Data Analytics and Business Intelligence Leader in Tax Technology Compliance (TTC) at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), LLP. He is responsible for analytics and go-to-market strategy. Dr. Berg is an internationally recognized expert in BI and a frequent speaker at major BI and SAP conferences world-wide, with over 20 years of experience in consulting. He regularly publishes articles in international BI journals and has written five books on business intelligence, analytics, and SAP HANA. Dr. Berg attended the Norwegian Military Academy, and served as an officer in the armed forces. He holds a BS in Finance from Appalachian State University, an MBA in Finance from East Carolina University, a Doctorate in Information Systems from the University of Sarasota, and a Ph.D. in IT from the University of North Carolina.

You may contact the author at bjarne.berg@pwc.com.

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