Guided Procedures for Alert Management allow to define and automate alert reactions using the guided procedure framework. They help reduce the time from detection to correction via
Alert Reaction procedures consist out of problem context collection activities and out of manual activities that guide you through the resolution of the alert. The problem context collection activities can be triggered automatically as soon as the alert was raised. They collect information like alert status, system and database status details. You can easily add custom operations that check for example database connectivity, the availability of certain processes on OS level or execute SQL statements for analysis. The results of the problem context collection are available in a result report directly accessible from the related alert in alert inbox. The manual activities guide you through the analysis and resolution of the problem. For example, they provide a navigation link to the file system browser that allows to analyze the relevant log and trace files of the managed system without OS level access. SAP Focused Run FP02 provides alert reaction procedures for ABAP and Java instance availability alerts. They can be used out of the box or enhanced with customer specific activities.
Alert Reaction procedures are currently only available for system monitoring alerts.
As soon as an alert is triggered, SAP Focused Run checks if suitable guided procedures exist for this alert. If suitable alert reaction procedures are found, the automatic activities inside the guided procedure are triggered automatically and collect different problem context collection data. The guided procedure and it's result report are accessible from the alert details.
You receive a notification about a new critical alert. From the notification, you open the alert screen and select the result report. You review the result report to understand the problem context and the current state:
Afterward open the guided procedures and follow the verification and solution activities. Read and follow the activity documentation and update the status of this activity. Optionally add a comment which is visible in the HTML result report. Some activities provide context-sensitive navigation links to other analysis tools (for example the file system browser to analyze log files). Follow the documentation to perform the activities in the analysis tool. After the problem was solved trigger the verification activities.
Optionally you can also search and trigger additional alert reaction procedures from the alert details screen as follows:
As soon as a new alert is triggered, the Outbound Adapter “GP alert handling” is called. The outbound adapter checks if suitable alert reaction procedures exist for this alert by comparing the alert attributes “Managed Object Name”, “Category” and “Technical name” to the corresponding guided procedure search attributes. If suitable alert reaction procedures are found, new execution instances of these guided procedures are triggered and registered for the alert. After registration, links to the relevant guided procedure and to their result reports become visible in alert details screen. The Outbound Adapter checks if the guided procedure search attribute “Can be executed automatically in background” is set to true. If yes, a new background job is created with the name “FRN_ARP_<GP Instance ID> running under user FRN_BTC_GPA. The job executes from the beginning of the guided procedure all automatic activities until the end if the guided procedure consists only out of automatic activities. If the guided procedure consists out of automatic activities and manual activities, it will stop at the first manual activity. Automatic activities behind the first manual activities will not be processed by the job but are intended to be processed by user processing the guided procedure.
Determine alert attributes
The alert reaction procedure needs to be mapped to 1 or several alerts. This is required so that the outbound connector can decide which guided procedure to trigger for a certain alert and that the guided procedure search functionality can find the right guided procedure for the alert. To map the guided procedure to an alert you need to determine the alert attributes as follows:
Create the new customer specific alert reaction procedure.
You can either create a new alert reaction procedure new or by copy using an existing procedure as template. We recommend to create it by copy as below:
If you have created a customer specific alert reaction procedure for an alert for which an alert reaction procedure has been delivered by SAP, both guided procedures will be triggered. The desired behavior is mostly that only the customer specific procedure is triggered. Proceed as follows to achieve this:
Add a step
To add a step, click on New, and select the step type in the menu. You can also reuse an existing step. A new step will be inserted below the selected step, in the Steps tree. Step types can be standard, parent, plug-in or complete.
How to define a help text
The step help text provides detailed information about each step, such as what is checked, and what will happen in the background.
The "New" button in the help text section opens the Create New Document pop up, which allows you to define documentation for a step or an activity.
You can create a new HTML document or upload a PDF. If the HTML result report needs to show also the documentation in line, choose HTML
Add a complete step
The Complete step is the last step in the guided procedure. It provides an overview of the execution status of the previous steps. Additionally, the HTML result can be generated from the complete step. If your guided procedure does not have a complete step yet, add it.
Remove a step
Select the step and click on Remove to remove obsolete steps.
Add activity
Each step consists out of 1 or more activities. The following activity types are supported by Guided Procedure Framework.
For alert reaction procedures, we recommend to use only manual or Plug-in activities.
Type | Description |
---|---|
Manual | Simple manual activities consist of a description and either no navigation link, or a navigation link to a UI in Focused Run, in the managed system, or an external link. The navigation link can be configured. |
Custom UIs | Some tasks to be carried out in the step of a guided procedure require input values and a more complex logic in the backend. Such steps usually need their own user interface for the user to input values. These tasks can be performed by custom steps. A custom step in a guided procedure is a step that contains its own user interface and own logic which is implemented in a backend webdynpro component. If you have developed a suitable webdynpro UI you can include it in the alert reaction procedure. However, webdynpro UIs are not suitable for automatic processing in background. Therefore we do not recommend to build your own Web Dynpro UIs and to embed them into guided procedures. |
Automatic | Automatic activities are activities that can be carried out in a guided procedure without user interaction or manual steps. If you have developed a suitable automatic activity you can include it in the alert reaction procedure. |
Plug-in | Plug-ins are automatic activities that can be customized during guided procedure creation time. SAP delivers many plug-ins that can be easily customized and included into the alert reaction procedure. |
Add plug-in activity
Proceed as follows to include a new plug-in activity in your alert reaction procedure:
Add Plug-in activities for alert reactions
The following plug-in activities are especially useful for alert reaction procedures
This Plug-in activity displays the status of the alert and the rating of its related metrics in a table.
It provides a context sensitive navigation link into the alert details for the alert.
It can be included at the beginning of the guided procedure to show the metrics at the time when the alert was raised and additionally at the end in the verification step to show whether the alert is resolved and related metrics have changed to green.
This Plug-in activity displays all currently open alerts for the system, it's instances, hosts and database in a table. It provides a navigation link into the alert inbox. This plug-in supports alert correlation. For example: If the system is down and the system database is down at the same time you can conclude that database unavailability might be root cause for system unavailability.
This plug-in activity checks if the simple diagnostics agents related to the system or database in scope of the guided procedure are reachable from Focused Run. It provides a context sensitive navigation link to the agent framework.
This plug-in activity can be used to check the status of ABAP or JAVA systems. It executes SAP Control functions for the ABAP or JAVA system in the scope of the guided procedure and displays the result in the table. The following sapcontrol functions are supported:
Function | Description |
---|---|
ABAPGetWPTable |
Display a snapshot of the current work process load of an ABAP system in the Alert reaction procedure similar to SM66 - Global Work Process Overview. |
ABAPGetSysWPTable |
Display a snapshot of the currently running work processes of an ABAP system in the Alert reaction procedure. |
GetProcessList |
Shows the running status of all processes of all system instances of an ABAP or Java system |
J2EEGetProcessList2 |
Shows the running status of all server nodes and of all system instances of an ABAP or Java system |
This plug-in activity can be used to check the status of databases. It executes SAP host control operations for databases. If the guided procedure is executed for a technical system, it executes the operations for the system database of the technical system. If the guided procedure is executed in the scope of a database it executes the operations for the database. of the system in the scope of the guided procedure and displays the result in the table. The following SAP host control operations are supported:
Operation |
Description |
---|---|
GetDatabase(System)Status |
Display the running status of all database components |
GetDatabaseProperties |
Display selected properties of the database . |
This plug-in activity triggers custom operations which are deployed on the SAP host agents of the managed systems host. Results of the custom operation are displayed in the guided procedure HTML result report.
An operation is, in SAPHostAgent, a set of command, executed in the configured order until the first failure happens, or the complete set was successfully executed. The result of every single command is returned in the result of the operation itself. The configuration of the operations is expected in the sub-directory operations.d of the exe directory where SAPHostAgent was installed (generally on UNIX /usr/sap/hostctl/exe, and on windows C:\Program Files\SAP\hostctrl\exe).
It is intended that custom operations are defined by the customer and distributed to the system landscape by customer specific deployment means. Focused Run does not deliver custom operations for Alert reactions or alert reaction and does not provide a deployment and distribution mechanism for custom operations.
How to define and test custom operations
Example:
You would like to define a custom operation that checks if the database is accessible from an ABAP instance by executing R3trans -d under the sidadm user . Required input parameter is the system identifier. The custom operation shall work for Unix systems
How to configure the custom operation plug-in
Result:
When the guided procedure is executed manually or automatically, the custom operation will be triggered on the specified hosts agents. If wait for result=yes, the returning data will be displayed. If the custom operation has a helper class, the result can be semantically evaluated and a corresponding log message will be written.
Examples:
Add Manual Activity
Manual activities to analyze log and trace files
Very often it is required to analyze critical errors in log and trace files. To support the analysis of relevant log and trace files without manual log on to the managed system or operating system level, Focused Run 1.0 FP03 provides the following:
The following expert navigation link classes are available:
You can define a manual activity to check relevant log and trace files of the managed system as follows:
Remove Activity
Select the relevant activity and press button "Remove" to remove the relevant activity if it is obsolete.
Change the contents and appearance of the alert reaction result report
Activate the customer specific Alert reaction guided procedure
Test the customer specific Alert reaction guided procedure
If the alert reaction guided procedure needs to be transported: