In an ideal world the customer has a homogeneous SAP landscape and monitors everything with SAP Solution Manager. Unfortunately, the real world is different and most customers have  SAP systems and non-SAP systems. Let's take the following banking scenario example to illustrate this.

The front-end applications are partially from SAP and most of the back-end systems are from SAP. To exchange data between the front-end applications and the back-end systems, there is a central non-SAP integration layer system in between. From a business process point of view, a process might start and end in an SAP system, but the non-SAP integration layer system is crucial for the whole process, so it definitely needs to be monitored.

You might monitor this non-SAP system with third-party monitoring but do you really want to:

• operate several monitoring solutions?
• maintain and train employees in several tools?

In the end, this is always an individual decision. If SAP Solution Manager is already established as a monitoring tool, and if the footprint of non-SAP applications is rather small, non-SAP monitoring in SAP Solution Manager may be a good solution.

Non-SAP systems can also be monitored with SAP Solution Manager. This provides you several benefits:

• You have a single point of truth for the overall system health
• You need to operate only one monitoring solution
• The operation team only needs to learn one monitoring tool
• There are no license costs when using SAP Solution Manager for non-SAP monitoring (except for CA Introscope in case this is needed)
• Seamless integration into SAP Solution Manager System Monitoring with same look and feel as well as functionality (metric history drill down, notifications and incidents)

Due to its comprehensive functionality, the End-to-End Monitoring and Alerting Infrastructure (MAI) of SAP Solution Manager has reached a level of some complexity. Without a deep knowledge of the infrastructure you might struggle to implement monitoring for non-SAP systems. But with a clear plan and guidance the implementation is not difficult. In any case, a good understanding of the non-SAP application and its technical architecture is essential to be able to analyze the feasibility of implementing non-SAP monitoring requirements. A general guidance including some information about the implementation process is presented here.

Before starting with the monitoring implementation for a non-SAP system, there are several prerequisites which have to be fulfilled. If you do not, sooner or later you will run into problems.

•  In the configuration of SAP Solution Manager (to be accessed via the SAP Fiori Launchpad Configuration - All Scenarios tile under SAP Solution Manager Configuration or, alternatively, using the SOLMAN_SETUP transaction)  the System Preparation, Infrastructure Preparation and Basic Configuration need to be successfully executed.
• The Managed System Configuration for the Solution Manager System itself needs to be successfully executed.
• The System Monitoring setup for the Solution Manager System itself needs to be successfully executed.
• You should already have some system monitoring experience.
• You should have a technical understanding of the Monitoring and Alerting Infrastructure (MAI).

The following diagram provides an overview of the different activities to be done. By following this process you can setup monitoring for a non-SAP system. The sections below provide details on the individual steps, and in some cases there is a how-to guide available showing a real example.

In addition to the general prerequisites above, there are some system specific preparations which need to be done.

Most of the metrics in the non-SAP environment are collected via the Diagnostics Agent and the SAP Host Agent. Please refer to SAP Note 1833501 and SAP Note 1858920 for the installation of the Diagnostics Agent.

In case of a high available non-SAP system it might be necessary to setup the Diagnostics Agent as an on-the-fly agent. Please refer to the Diagnostics Agent and HA Support wiki page for details.

Most of the monitoring metrics for non-SAP systems can be collected via the Diagnostics Agent and the SAP Host Agent. For the performance monitoring of Java and .NET based systems, we rely on CA Introscope metrics. SAP Solution Manager includes a Right to View license which can be used for all applications sold by SAP. Using CA Introscope for non-SAP systems requires a SAP Extended Diagnostics by CA (SED) license which can be bought from SAP. Below is a comparison of the Right to View versus the SAP Extended Diagnostics by CA license.

Once you have the SED you will get the full version of CA Introscope with unlocked agents and additional instrumentation for common third party middleware products. It also includes Introscope agent installation guides.

In case you already have a SED license, refer to SAP Note 1280961.

One feature of the Monitoring and Alerting Infrastructure (MAI) of Solution Manager 7.2 is its landscape awareness. This means Solution Manager knows the system landscape and maps the monitored metrics to the landscape objects, which are the so called Managed Objects (MO). The following picture provides an overview of the available MO in system monitoring:

For mainstream SAP systems, their landscape information is normally reported automatically (via various SLD data suppliers → SLD → LMDB) to SAP Solution Manager. For non-SAP systems, there is normally no automatic SLD data supplier and the landscape information needs to be maintained manually in SAP Solution Manager. This is a fairly simple process and is described in the how-to guide Creating Unspecific Cluster System.

After the non-SAP system was created in SAP Solution Manager, the Managed System Configuration needs to be done for it. The main purposes of the Managed System Configuration for non-SAP systems are:

• assigning the Diagnostics Agent(s) to the non-SAP system.
• assigning the Introscope Enterprise Manager to be used for the non-SAP system.
• setting up the system related extractors and the Introscope Host Adapter (part of the Diagnostics Agent).

As for SAP systems, you must follow the Managed System Configuration guided procedure.