Enterprise Monitoring and BusinessObjects Enterprise XI

Introduction

About Enterprise Monitoring

When we talk about Monitoring, we like to differentiate system and application monitoring. System monitoring is about the environment the application is running in , while application monitoring is really focused on the application itself (i.e. Business Objects Enterprise and its components). The goal is to detect signs of instability and do proactive maintenance before any major impact the end users, hence better your business. It also provides a good understanding of the platform usage, whether the infrastructure is under-used or over-loaded. For example, it may give good data points to adjust the hardware or sizing of a BOE landscape.

• System monitoring may cover anything external to the application : OS, networking, CPU, IO, memory, etc. This is a market that other vendors have built expertise on with products like IBM Tivoli, BMC Patrol or Microsoft SCOM. What we (SAP BusinessObjects) can provide to customers is information on which processes, resources, thresholds are relevant to a monitoring strategy for BOE. The tool to implement it will be from another vendor.

• Application monitoring focuses on availability and performance of the application itself. One would typically mimic user actions on a regular basis as a "health check" and build metrics on error rate and response time.

These two approaches obviously complement each other and are necessary to provide an administrator a full picture of how the application behaves. As an example : a process can be alive, low in memory and CPU and still perform poorly, or vice-versa.

Monitoring Add-on for BOE XI R2 and XI3.1

BOE XI R2 and XI3.1 offer very limited monitoring features natively : there is a few metrics from the Central Management Console and Audit data available through Auditor (reporting). The Monitoring Add-On for XI R2 and XI3.1 aims at filling that gap and providing customers with a preview of the technology planned for the future releases of BOE. It is available for download from the Innovation Center web site on SDN :
Monitoring add-on for SAP BusinessObjects from Innovation Center

There is 2 parts to this add-on :

1. best practices documentation on system monitoring (CPU, IO, memory, etc) : it describes which processes and resources are relevant and how to best monitor them
2. application monitoring through a set of probes : this focuses on availability and performance of the application through scripted user actions

The add-on can potentially be integrated into any monitoring solution, but some detailed documentation is provided to integrate it into IBM Tivoli and Microsoft Operations Manager 2005. We know of customers who have implemented the add-on on production systems with IBM Tivoli, BMC Patrol, Zabbix, MOM 2005.

Note: Like other add-ons or components from the Innovation Center, it is provided free of charge and aims at collecting feedback on technology SAP BusinessObjects is considering. Pleas refer to the Innovation Center web page for details on how to provide feedback.

Need more information to implement the add-on ?

• Monitoring Guide for XI3.1
• Monitoring Guide for XIR2
• step by step tutorials :
  • How to use the Monitoring probes
  • Running a probe in web mode
  • Integrating probes with enterprise monitoring solutions
  • How to integrate the Monitoring Add-On with IBM Tivoli
  • How to integrate the Monitoring Add-On with Microsoft MOM 2005 or SCOM 2007
  • How to integrate the Monitoring Add-On with BMC TM ART
• Create a Crystal Report on top of the Monitoring probes output