Foglight for SAP HANA

Description

SAP HANA is an in-memory, relational database management system. It operates primarily as a column-oriented store, but row-oriented tables are also supported, and both transactional and analytical workloads are supported. SAP HANA is fully ACID compliant. Features include a JSON store, spatial data processing, text analytics and search, time-series analytics, streaming data processing, and graph data processing.

An SAP HANA system contains a single system database and zero or more isolated tenant databases. Multiple servers working together comprise the database system: name server, index server, preprocessor server, compile server, script server, XS Advanced runtime, and others. A single system can be distributed across multiple hosts to improve scalability and can utilize replication for high availability.

Business Challenge

Without comprehensive monitoring, capacity issues become visible only when resources are nearly exhausted or failures occur. Due to the novel nature of many SAP HANA features, troubleshooting may require deep expertise in SAP HANA-specifics in addition to general SQL and database management experience.

Correlating information across multiple tools can be time-consuming. Consequently, there is a need for a centralized observability solution that combines SAP HANA metrics and analytics to reduce manual investigation effort and improve proactive planning.

Key Features

The Foglight for SAP HANA Agent monitors the current and historical status of SAP HANA database systems. Database configuration and performance statistics are collected and presented in real-time dashboards and are also available in packaged reports. Alerts are generated on respective components of the system when indicators of current or potential future performance or availability issues arise.

Setup involves creating a monitoring agent for each target database system. Such agents are fully remote, meaning they are typically configured on a separate host. Installing the agent on the Foglight Agent Manager ensures that nothing needs to be installed on the monitored system. A database user with appropriate permissions is used by the agent to collect data, and an agent may also be configured to collect operating system metrics for monitoring the database host and logs.

Data is collected from each configured SAP HANA system via the official JDBC driver. Collections take place at regular, configurable intervals: critical metrics such as system availability are collected frequently, while data expected to change less frequently is collected at longer intervals. Metrics are compared against thresholds and historical performance to identify possible system performance and availability issues.