Set up observability for SAP HANA databases with Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights

Introduction

SAP applications support mission-critical business processes, so customers want to be able to identify and resolve issues impacting their SAP HANA databases quickly. However, SAP workloads have unique requirements and consumption patterns, and getting HANA-specific intelligence can be complex. Further, when issues are identified, finding root cause can also be difficult.

Since 2019, AWS customers have been using Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights to solve these same challenges for Microsoft SQL Server databases and .NET-based Applications. Earlier this week, we announced that CloudWatch Application Insights now supports observability for SAP HANA databases. This will make it easier than ever before to understand the health of your HANA databases using native AWS services.

How CloudWatch Application Insights for SAP HANA works

You can easily onboard SAP HANA databases and setup monitors relevant for resources (e.g. memory, disk usage, etc.) to continuously analyze data, uncover potential problems and help to quickly isolate ongoing issues with your HANA based applications or underlying infrastructure.

Application Insights analyzes metric patterns using historical data to detect anomalies, and continuously track errors and exceptions from HANA, operating system, and infrastructure logs. It correlates observations using a combination of classification algorithms and built-in rules. Then, it automatically creates dashboards that show the relevant observations and problem severity information to help you prioritize your actions. For common problems in HANA, such as an unresponsive system, failed database backups, memory leaks, or canceled I/O operations, it provides additional insights to help guide towards a root cause and steps for resolution.

Guided, intuitive setup of all HANA instances

CloudWatch Application Insights reduces the time it takes to set up monitoring by scanning the HANA systems in a specific Resource Group, providing a customizable list of recommended metrics and logs, and setting them up on CloudWatch to provide visibility into various resources, such as Amazon EC2 and Elastic Load Balancers (ELB), Operating system, and SAP HANA. It also sets up dynamic alarms on monitored metrics which are automatically updated based on anomalies detected on historical data.

Problem detection and notification

CloudWatch Application Insights detects signs of potential problems with SAP HANA, such as metric anomalies and log errors. It correlates these observations to surface potential problems with the application and generates CloudWatch Events which can be configured to receive notifications or take actions. This eliminates the need for you to create individual alarms on metrics or log errors. In the below example you can see how we can debug an out-of-memory issue with the HANA instance

Finally, CloudWatch Application Insights anomaly detection leverages Amazon Sagemaker to apply statistical and machine learning algorithms on logs and metrics data from systems and applications, determine normal baselines, and surface anomalies with minimal user intervention. This is accomplished by using the metric’s past data (eg. hanadb_cpu_percent) to create a model of the metric’s expected values. The model assesses both trends and hourly, daily, and weekly patterns of the metric.

Get started with Application Insights for SAP HANA today

Minimizing disruption to HANA databases and the business processes they support is critical for SAP customers. Thousands of customers run HANA on AWS largely because running on a secure, reliable, and performant cloud infrastructure like AWS makes that easier than is possible on-premises . This week’s launch of Application Insights for SAP HANA makes it even easier for customers by adding SAP-specific metrics and insights with minimal configuration required.

To setup monitoring for your SAP HANA databases today, refer to the Amazon CloudWatch Application Insights documentation for detailed tutorials on how to get started.

To learn why AWS is the platform of choice and innovation for 5000+ SAP customers and hundreds of partners, visit aws.com/sap.