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SAP remote support component is a system monitoring and root cause analysis platform developed by SAP AG and is provided for free to SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise customers who have a standard or enterprise support contract. Remote support component can be considered as a light weight version of SAP Solution Manager and is intended for landscapes that do not have a pre-existing SAP infrastructure (eg. SAP NetWeaver, SAP BW, SAP R/3, etc). It is an add-on solution that allows an administrator to better manage the health and performance of their BusinessObjects Enterprise environments. Remote support component is also used by the SAP AGS support team as a root cause analysis tool for solving complex issues. Additionally, remote support component automates the delivery of SAP services such as the EarlyWatch Check.

Architecture
The remote support component landscape consists of several sub-components each providing a specific functionality. These sub-components run on computer systems designated as either a managing host or a managed host. The managing host is the centralized node that manages and communicates with all the managed hosts in a monitoring landscape. The managed hosts include SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise nodes, application servers, database servers, or any other server where monitoring would be applicable.

Monitoring with BusinessObjects Dashboards
SAP remote support component provides a robust monitoring platform through it's integration of Wily Introscope by Computer Associates. A series of pre-designed dashboards are included and provide the administrator insight into various aspects of the BusinessObjects Enterprise system. At a glance, an administrator can quickly spot bottlenecks in the system and take immediate action to resolve the performance issue before it manifests into a larger system-wide outage. The dashboards eliminate the need to examine the performance of each host in the landscape individually as all hosts in the landscape can be observed simultaneously in one combined view.

Content included in the BusinessObjects Dashboards include:

Root Cause Analysis Tools
In addition to monitoring, remote support component also facilitates the ability to perform root cause analysis to find the source of complex problems. Normally, SAP Support would request that Web Applications and server components be traced for a period of time after which the log files could be compiled and analyzed to determine the cause of a particular issue. Now, through the use of the CA Wily Investigator and the CA Wily Transaction Tracer tools it is possible to do in-depth analysis much faster and easier without the additional work and performance overhead that component tracing introduces on the system.

Wily Investigator
The Wily Investigator is a collection of all performance data collected by remote support component and is grouped in a tree format by hostname, agent type, and metric type. Where the BusinessObjects Dashboards provide specific views of data for monitoring purposes, the Wily Investigator allows the administrator to drill-down further into a superset of the same data. By analyzing the data in this format, the administrator may easily answer questions regarding the health and performance of each indivdual node and application in the monitoring landscape. Furthermore, the data may be collected over an extended period of time and then viewed across weeks or months in order to determine performance trends or to observe system growth over time.

The type of metrics that can be analyzed include:
 * Operating System (including CPU utilization, Memory, Disk I/O, Network I/O, etc)
 * Web Application Server (Java Heap, Garbage Collection, Threads, CPU)
 * Client SDK Calls
 * Application Server SDK Calls
 * Backend Server Component SDK Calls
 * BOE Server Metrics (C++ and Java based Servers)
 * Database & Query
 * OLAP & TRex Requests
 * Virtualization Metrics

Transaction Tracer
When enabled by an administrator or developer, the Transaction Tracer tracks details about a specific workflow or individual request. The data collected in this tracing session shows data as granular as the function calls themselves. Information about the arguments passed into the function, time spent executing the function, and the values of variables is also collected. The data can then be consumed and analyzed in a variety of ways including call stack format, a timeline, and a summary view. Regardless of the underlying programming language used to create the components being traced, the Transaction Tracer can merge the traces from all these components into one combined end to end view making this tool particularly useful for debugging various types of code level problems. This is made possible since the data is abstracted from the Wily Agent / Solution Manager Diagnostic Agent and not directly from the indivdual process being monitored.

EarlyWatch Alert Reporting
The EarlyWatch Alert report (also known as EWA report) is a report that is generated by remote support component once a week and then delivered to the system administrator's Service Marketplace inbox. Throughout the week, key performance data is collected from each host in the monitoring landscape and then the data is compiled, aggregated, and analyzed by SAP backend systems. Without a remote support component implementation, the EarlyWatch Alert check has to be provided by an SAP consultant who must collect and analyze the data manually which takes a considerable amount of time and resources.

The report's main objective is to detect potential system issues such as frequent hard drive paging, CPU thrashing, and low memory conditions. These problems are then clearly outlined in the report so that the administrator may take preventative action before the problem becomes a complete system wide outage. Additionally, each indivdual SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise server setting is compared to the SAP recommended setting and if the setting is determined to be abnormal, the administrator will then be alerted. With this automatic safety feature, oversights and changes to settings that were made in error can be caught and corrected before they result in degradation in performance or unexpected behavior.

The EarlyWatch Alert report is also used extensively by SAP Support each time a support message is entered into the support system. With an up to date report accessible for the Support Consultant, it is no longer necessary to explain the layout and details of a system landscape. As a result, less time is spent collecting information about the system and more time is dedicated to actually resolving the problem and restoring system performance.

A complete EarlyWatch Alert report generated by remote support component contains five chapters on the following topics:


 * 1) Landscape Overview
 * 2) Software Configuration
 * 3) Hardware Capacity Check
 * 4) Business Objects - Technology Checks
 * 5) Further Recommendations