3 Important SAP HANA health checks you must do

5,250 customers have adopted SAP’s platform-as-a-service HANA Cloud Platform (HCP), along with 525 partners, according to figures SAP shared publicly in early November 2016. During 2016 many organizations started to ramp up their use of HANA, as can be seen from these numbers to the ones SAP supplied two months earlier in September, which had HCP customers at over avantr4,000 and partners at 500.

As defined by SAP, HANA is deployable on premise or in the cloud. It is an in-memory computing platform that lets you accelerate business processes, deliver more business intelligence, and simplify your IT environment.

As with any new system, HANA brings new challenges. As a non-cloud server, it needs to be monitored to ensure that the system is available, working properly and performs as expected. Daily tests & reporting needs to be part of the daily routine of every SAP Basis engineer who manages a SAP HANA environment.

We’ve created a checklist to help simplify your HANA monitoring and ensure that you are monitoring the right things.

Download the HANA health checklist NOW 

Few elements that you need to make sure included in your SAP HANA monitoring daily routine are the following

• Hardware resource consumption and usage (CPU, Memory, Disk, etc.)
• Emergency Setup (Backups, alerts, HA, DR, etc.)
• Availability and performance of the server
• And a world of various other checks, monitors, and alerts

While each is vitally important and requires proper monitoring, there are various documents already written on it. In this post, we will review three unique HANA health checks that can help ensure that your HANA environment is running properly

1. Integrity of the SAP HANA landscape - In order to ensure proper operation, it is important to understand that each component of the HANA landscape is available.  HANA environments are complex and usually spread over multiple servers.  In the case of failovers, it is vital to verify all necessary HANA components are available on the correct server.  Standard up/down monitoring of each component is not sufficient.  Each component should be tied to it’s dependent counterpart at each level.
2. Report Expensive SQL Statements - Expensive SQL are ones that cause the database to read many blocks from disk or buffer. When transactions using these statements are executed, the end user response time may lag as it attempts to use too many resources. Out of the box, HANA does not set any thresholds to alert on statements that are expensive (run for long periods of time and take up resources).
   Before HANA was available, expensive SQL statements were reported on weekly or monthly EWA reports.  With the speed achieved using HANA it is best practice to be monitoring this in near real time or as often as you can. Now, not only can these statements be monitored live, the amount of peak memory (most memory used) can be directly associated and identified with a problem statement.

3. SAP HANA Delta Merges:  Write operations in a SAP HANA environment are handled on the delta storage. In order to transform the data into a format that is optimized in terms of memory consumption and read performance, it must be transferred to the main storage. This is accomplished using the delta merge operation.  This operation goes into multiple writes, deletes, and possibly even reorders rows and adjusts compression parameters, this process requires not only extensive CPU usage but also a high use of memory as it writes in parallel and duplicates memory usage (temporarily). To ensure proper operations, it’s important to verify that the duration of the delta merge operation is not exceeding normal write times

These are just a few examples to the extensive list of HANA health checks that needs to be done in the least detail. The depth of the monitoring as high or low as the reporting granularity and availability that you are looking to achieve. While each system is different, we’ve assembled a list of a set of daily health checks that can be done manually. Or if you are looking to enhance your monitoring and become a proactive SAP Basis Engineer check out Avantra's automated real-time monitors and predictive analysis. I would also love to hear from you, what unique HANA checks have you found valuable?