Many large and medium-sized companies rely on SAP as their ERP solution for business-critical areas. One reason they use SAP is for its high availability features. A system failure or performance degradation will cause high expenditures in IT and create work restrictions for users and customers—and using a highly available database will prevent this from happening.
But here's the challenge: besides Solution Manager, what do you actually use for SAP monitoring? If you've ever dealt with intermittent authentication issues or performance problems that are difficult to catch, you know that standard SAP tools don't always cover all your monitoring needs.
IT is responsible for securing and monitoring business-critical applications. IT and SAP managers must ensure that SAP systems (SAP System Monitoring) and databases (such as SAP HANA, Sybase, MaxDB, Oracle, DB2, or MSSQL) run without problems or failures and that the company's business processes are running smoothly at all times.
An IT manager faces critical questions every day:
These aren't just theoretical concerns. When your primary domain controller starts experiencing high CPU utilization and authentication requests begin timing out, production systems start failing. The problem is often intermittent, making it difficult to catch without comprehensive monitoring.
We recently wrote about how you can monitor your ERP environment with PRTG Network Monitor in general. Effective SAP monitoring should cover the following areas:
Today we look at what monitoring the databases and jobs in SAP can look like with PRTG, and how you can gain real-time visibility into your entire SAP ecosystem.
Database monitoring is critical for SAP environments. Your SAP HANA system, along with any non-SAP databases in your landscape, requires continuous oversight to prevent downtime and ensure optimal performance.
Key database metrics to track include:
Without proper monitoring, you won't know if your database is approaching capacity limits until users start experiencing slowdowns or system failures occur.
With Scansor, itesys provides user-defined sensors for PRTG that can monitor SAP landscapes in real time. The query is carried out via a direct query in SAP or delivered from the database to PRTG and is therefore up-to-date and precise.
For this purpose, a specific monitoring user is created in the SAP system; the role and access authorizations (SAP authorization concept) are supplied with the SAP monitoring license.
The SAP HANA sensor monitors a SAP HANA database system. It uses RFC (Remote Function Call) to connect to the SAP system and retrieve critical metrics.
Key monitoring capabilities include:
The SAP Job sensor monitors the status of SAP background jobs. This is essential for detecting job interruptions before they impact business processes.
Monitoring features:
The SAP System sensor provides comprehensive oversight of your SAP application servers and ABAP systems.
What it monitors:
Real-time monitoring is essential for SAP environments where downtime directly impacts business operations. PRTG provides continuous visibility into your SAP landscape with automated alerting when thresholds are exceeded.
Automation capabilities include:
SAP doesn't operate in isolation. Your application performance monitoring strategy should encompass the entire technology stack that supports your SAP environment.
Critical components to monitor:
This comprehensive approach ensures you can perform effective troubleshooting and root cause analysis when issues occur, rather than guessing which layer of your infrastructure is causing problems.
Collecting metrics is only valuable if you can visualize and act on them. PRTG provides customizable dashboards and templates that help you:
The ability to see your entire SAP landscape at a glance—from application servers to databases to business processes—enables proactive management rather than reactive firefighting.
To implement SAP monitoring with PRTG and Scansor sensors, you'll need:
The starter pack includes basic sensors like "SAP SysCheck.exe" and "SAP SysInfo.exe" that provide general system and SAP information. Extended monitoring capabilities are available through additional sensor packages.
PRTG Network Monitor with Scansor sensors provides comprehensive SAP monitoring without the maintenance overhead of Solution Manager. It monitors SAP HANA, application servers, jobs, and business processes in real-time with automated alerting and customizable dashboards.
PRTG automatically logs all monitoring data with configurable retention periods. You can track system availability, generate uptime reports, and analyze historical performance trends. The Available.log on your SAP work directory also contains uptime/downtime records that can be correlated with PRTG data.
Yes. PRTG is a unified monitoring platform that tracks your entire IT infrastructure—SAP systems, databases, servers, network devices, applications, and cloud services—all from a single interface. This eliminates the need for multiple monitoring tools that don't communicate with each other.
Effective SAP monitoring isn't just about knowing when something breaks—it's about detecting issues before they impact your business. With real-time visibility into your SAP HANA databases, application servers, jobs, and business processes, you can:
Whether you're running SAP on-premise or in a hybrid cloud environment, comprehensive monitoring with PRTG gives you the observability you need to keep business-critical systems running smoothly.
Ready to see how PRTG can monitor your SAP environment? Explore monitoring with PRTG and download our 30-day trial today!