Course Introduction
Amazon CloudWatch
Audit Logs
AWS CloudTrail
AWS Config
AWS Logging
Cost Management
AWS Systems Manager
What is the AWS Data Provider for SAP?
The course is part of this learning path
In this section of the AWS Certified: SAP on AWS Specialty learning path, we introduce you to strategies for operating and monitoring SAP workloads on AWS.
Learning Objectives
- Understand how to use Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, and AWS Config to manage and monitor SAP infrastructure on AWS
- Describe various AWS cost management tools including Cost Explorer, AWS Cost and Usage Reports, and AWS Budgets
- Understand how to automate patch and state operations for our SAP instances using AWS Systems Manager
- Explain how the AWS Data Provider for SAP is used to help gather performance-related data across AWS services
Prerequisites
The AWS Certified: SAP on AWS Specialty certification has been designed for anyone who has experience managing and operating SAP workloads. Ideally you’ll also have some exposure to the design and implementation of SAP workloads on AWS, including migrating these workloads from on-premises environments. Many exam questions will require a solutions architect level of knowledge for many AWS services. All of the AWS Cloud concepts introduced in this course will be explained and reinforced from the ground up.
Hello and welcome to this lecture where I shall answer the questions, ‘what is the AWS Data Provider for SAP?’. Well, we can certainly assume that it is some kind of data collection tool that integrates with SAP, but what data does it collate? what does it do with it? and why?
The AWS Data Provider for SAP is a tool that can be used to help you collate and gather performance-related data across AWS services which can then be fed to SAP applications, allowing them to enhance the performance of business transactions. When running multiple SAP applications across your AWS environment, many hosted on Amazon EC2 instances, they will be generating a high number of business transactions which are crucial to your business operations. Having an insight into these transactions can help you resolve any issues that may arise, allowing you to quickly and efficiently troubleshoot any performance issues that occur, and this is where the AWS Data Provider for SAP comes into play.
However, before you can gain these insights and benefits that this tool brings, there is a prerequisite to installing the DataProvider agent on your EC2 instances that are supporting your SAP applications, allowing you to monitor transactions. It’s worth noting that this agent is free of charge, however, there are underlying costs associated with the agent as it makes GetMetric calls to both Amazon CloudWatch for regular data interval collection, in addition to the Amazon EC2 API to retrieve specific metric data.
The information and data that the agent receives can come from Amazon CloudWatch, your EC2 instances in your environment, and instance metadata, which include metrics on your Operating Systems, the storage being used, in addition to networking information, all of which are valuable to your SAP architecture.
The AWS Data Provider for SAP then feeds this valuable metric data to monitoring transactions built within SAP applications designed to present performance statistics via the SAP Operating System Collector (SAPOSCOL) and the SAP CIM Provider. CIM stands for Common Information Model, and it provides a standard for SAP to describe management information within a computing environment. From this diagram, we can see how these components work together.
As you can see, we have an EC2 instance within A VPC with the Data Provider for SAP agent installed. This is gathering data from a number of sources, firstly, from other EC2 instances within your environment via the EC2 Endpoint. You can also see it is gathering metric data from Amazon CloudWatch, in addition to the instances' own metadata and OS information. All of this data is being fed into the Data Provider for SAP. This gathered data is then read by the SAP Operating Collector (SAPOSCOL) and the SAP CIM Provider and passed to the SAP system.
At this point, the AWS stats and metrics collected can be analyzed using the SAP CCMS. For quick access to this data, you can enter the transaction st06 (or /nst06) in the upper-left transaction field of the SAP GUI.
Stuart has been working within the IT industry for two decades covering a huge range of topic areas and technologies, from data center and network infrastructure design, to cloud architecture and implementation.
To date, Stuart has created 150+ courses relating to Cloud reaching over 180,000 students, mostly within the AWS category and with a heavy focus on security and compliance.
Stuart is a member of the AWS Community Builders Program for his contributions towards AWS.
He is AWS certified and accredited in addition to being a published author covering topics across the AWS landscape.
In January 2016 Stuart was awarded ‘Expert of the Year Award 2015’ from Experts Exchange for his knowledge share within cloud services to the community.
Stuart enjoys writing about cloud technologies and you will find many of his articles within our blog pages.