Concept of the Monitoring Architecture

Purpose

The alerts are displayed in a tree structure in the alert monitor, and assigned a severity and a color (yellow for a warning, red for a problem). You can see the current status of your system and process alerts here. The alert monitor is based on the monitoring architecture, which was introduced in SAP R/3 4.0:

The CCMS monitoring architecture is not a monolithic monitoring and administration program. Rather, it offers a flexible framework into which extensive monitoring and administration functions can easily be added.

The elements of the monitoring architecture function largely independently of each other and can, particularly, be further developed and adjusted independently of each other.

· Data Supplier

A data supplier is a program that delivers data to the monitoring architecture. It belongs to one of the individual system components and creates monitoring objects that report values to the monitoring architecture. The monitoring architecture is delivered with the data suppliers for the most important components of your SAP system and its environment and can therefore be immediately used.

Data suppliers pass their information to the monitoring architecture. The monitoring architecture provides an infrastructure for gathering and managing system information. The monitoring architecture therefore constantly compares the values reported by the data suppliers for the monitored objects with threshold values and displays an alert if a value exceeds or falls below a threshold value.

· Data Consumers

A data consumer is a program that reads data from the monitoring architecture; it displays the information transferred to the monitoring architecture by the data suppliers. SAP delivers both the standard data consumer and other special monitors that all use the data delivered by the monitoring architecture.

· Monitoring Objects and Attributes

A monitoring object describes an object that is to be monitored. A monitoring attribute represents a type of information that is to be reported for a monitoring object. Monitoring objects include, for example, the CPU in your host system, the database, and SAP services, such as background processing. Monitoring attributes for a CPU object could be CPU utilization and the average CPU workload for the last five minutes.

The alert monitor also provides the administration methods that you need to monitor the system. In this way, you can set threshold values for alerts and add or adjust auto-reaction and analysis methods: if an alert is triggered, auto-reaction methods react automatically, and you can use an analysis method to investigate the cause of an alert without leaving the alert monitor. The monitoring architecture also contains tools for administering and archiving the alerts.