SAP HANA and In-Memory Computing:

HANA Daily Monitoring Template

Posted by singh vinay Apr 5, 2014

The below blog intend to help HANA admin to

have a sample template that they can use for
monitoring there HANA environment on proactive basis.
you all are invited to add you comments if you feel we should include some more steps in the template . Its
intention is monitoring not resolution , each issue reported can be resolved separately .You can use this
template also as pointer for what all should be monitor if you are monitoring you SAP HANA landscape via SAP
Solution Manager.
1. Check first if all the services are running fine :-

2.Run Unique checker (you can schedule it in you crontab also ,so as to get updates automatically in your
mail box.
This program helps you to find duplicate entries in tables . Reach out to SAP to get the program or refer
to
https://help.sap.com/hana/SAP_HANA_Administration_Guide_en.pdf if you do not have it.

3.Check for CRASH dumps if Any :-

Generated by Jive on 2014-06-08+02:00

1

SAP HANA and In-Memory Computing: HANA Daily Monitoring Template

check it on admin console -->Performance -->to see the dumps (OOM dumps as well) give the serach text as
"dump"
if you find any crash dump -->analyze if its because of any query -->notify the query owner to optimize it in
case if its causing dumps.
4. check SLT - if any table has error status

No error so all is good.

5. Check LTR as well :

Also check the traditional T-codes ST22 and SM21 , it should not have any critical dumps .
6. clean up the garbage memory:frequency could be everyday or once in 3 days you can decide after seeing the pattern :
execute mm gc -f
It triggers the garbage collector and without unloading the tables it free up memory .
Remark - to execute mm gc -f you need to log in HANA server --> HDBAdmin.sh-->Services-->console ->select the node --> execute the command.

7. Validate Backup - Successful backup taken on **/**/** . Next Back Up on **/**/**.

Generated by Jive on 2014-06-08+02:00

2

SAP HANA and In-Memory Computing: HANA Daily Monitoring Template

Analyze if the backup failed and take action accordingly .

Hope this template helps you to keep you HANA environment healthy and running

. Happy Monitoring .

Please add any step you feel should be part of daily monitoring task .
1597 Views Tags: hana, monitoring

vivek kapoor
May 30, 2014 11:36 PM
Thanks VInay it is very nice doc
Andy Silvey
May 14, 2014 9:33 AM
Hi Vinay,
there's a useful OSS Note on which compliments this blog and subject:
1977584 - Technical Consistency Checks for SAP HANA Databases

Best regards,
Andy.
Justin Molenaur in response to Lars Breddemann on page 3
May 5, 2014 7:28 PM
Thanks Lars. I guess the main thing I wanted to know is if the so called garbage (if left piled up the alley),
would affect performance globally or if it would be on an object by object basis.
Regards,
Justin
Lars Breddemann in response to Justin Molenaur on page 4
May 5, 2014 9:39 AM
Hi Justin
sorry, too few details here to even make an educated guess.
"Garbage" data is all data we don't need any more. This includes old versions of data that once were current as
well as temporary data and so forth.
The garbage collection works allocator and virtual file wise. E.g. LOB columns have their own separate
memory handling.
All this happens automatically and typically no user interaction is required.

Generated by Jive on 2014-06-08+02:00

3

SAP HANA and In-Memory Computing: HANA Daily Monitoring Template

- Lars
Lars Breddemann in response to Justin Molenaur on page 4
May 5, 2014 9:36 AM
Hi Justin
Corruption in data structures can be experienced in all sorts of ways:
wrong data, no error message
wrong data and error messages
error messages
system crashes

For most cases SAP HANA should be able to figure out a corruption by itself and also "repair" the corrupted
data by re-reading the last saved state from disk and re-applying all changes performed since (apply redo log).
- Lars
George Varghese
May 4, 2014 12:55 PM
thanks Vinay .....very helpful info
Justin Molenaur in response to Lars Breddemann on page 6
Apr 29, 2014 4:26 PM
Lars - to my other point - how can you really observe table corruption?
Regards,
Justin
Justin Molenaur in response to Lars Breddemann on page 7
Apr 29, 2014 4:03 PM
Hi Lars/Vinay, I am just curious as to the garbage collector function. I searched all help documents and SCN
and can't really find any documents that describe this in more detail. Does this "garbage" affect HANA globally
or only specific tables? In what cases is "garbage" created?
Reason I am interested is that I was involved in a scenario last week where the performance on a few select
tables degraded to a horrendous amount, whereas all other tables in the system were performing optimally.
Even a SELECT COUNT(*) on the affected tables were taking upwards of 1 minute on 250 million records,
where the same query on a 1.5 billion row table was 250ms. On checking the merge, column optimization,
system load and all the "normal" methods to see what may be affecting performance I came up empty handed
with no explanation. Miraculously at some later point, the specific tables starting performing normally, again no action or explanation.
I am wondering if garbage collection could be an explanation or if there are other underlying "corruption"
indicators to check for on specific tables.

Generated by Jive on 2014-06-08+02:00

4

SAP HANA and In-Memory Computing: HANA Daily Monitoring Template

Regards,
Justin
Kartik Kumar
Apr 29, 2014 2:42 PM
Hello Vinay,
Very nice article. Thanks.
Need your help on one issue,
following point 2, I have scheduled unique checker in crontab in HANA server with sidadm user, but script fails
with below error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "uniqueChecker.py", line 8, in <module>
from hdbcli import dbapi
File "/HANA/sapmnt/<SID>/exe/linuxx86_64/HDB_1.00.53.375657_1048054/python_support/hdbcli/dbapi.py",
line 15, in <module>
import pyhdbcli
ImportError: No module named pyhdbcli.

However, I am able to run Unique checker manually on the server.

Srinivasan Vinayagam
Apr 22, 2014 2:15 PM
Dear Vinay,

Very Nice info...Thank You....Kindly keep more blogs.

Regards,
V Srinivasan
Nidhi Agrawal
Apr 20, 2014 8:57 AM
nice Article
singh vinay in response to Randy Middleton on page 6
Apr 10, 2014 3:45 PM
thanks Randy,

Generated by Jive on 2014-06-08+02:00

5

SAP HANA and In-Memory Computing: HANA Daily Monitoring Template

for reading and liking it .

regards,
vinaysingh
Randy Middleton
Apr 9, 2014 9:09 PM
Nice Article. Thanks a lot. I will follow the script as stated. Until I can learn better.
This is good as a base line to start.
Thanks again.
Jinsu Jung
Apr 8, 2014 6:13 AM
Thanks
singh vinay in response to Lars Breddemann on page 6
Apr 8, 2014 6:09 AM
Hi Lars,
Thanks for the valuable input,we are in process of doing the same ( as recommended by AGS to us) .
will update how it does after the Hardware upgrade.
regards,
vinay singh
Jake Echanove in response to Lars Breddemann on page 7
Apr 7, 2014 11:25 PM
I'ver added hdbbackupcheck to my backup script. No substitute for actually restoring on another instance, but
verifies consistency.
1869119 - Checking backups using hdbbackupcheck
Lars Breddemann in response to singh vinay on page 6
Apr 7, 2014 9:55 PM
Singh,
when you see frequent table corruption, you don't need the uniqueChecker. You need new hardware (or
upgrade to a newer revision...)
- Lars
Saeed Ramadan Amin
Apr 7, 2014 12:45 PM
nice article

Generated by Jive on 2014-06-08+02:00

6

SAP HANA and In-Memory Computing: HANA Daily Monitoring Template

singh vinay in response to Lars Breddemann on page 7

Apr 7, 2014 11:37 AM
hi Lards,
thanks for the input.
i agree with you these two take lot of toll and time, so it should not be ran everyday.
But as said (in my case also ) it depends upon your requirement especially for unique checker . If you see
frequent table corruption , so give filter on that particular table/s and run for it only rather than running for all
table.
regards,
vinaysingh
Lars Breddemann
Apr 7, 2014 11:07 AM
Hi there!
Nice blog and thanks for sharing.
Few comments:
Point 2 (uniquechecker) and 6 (garbage cleanup) are definitively not required nor recommended to run on a
daily basis.
Also, HDBAdmin is not supported for any use outside SAP HANA development.
Concerning the validate backup: full agreement, the backups need to be checked.
But simply checking if they ran without error doesn't cut it.
To actually validate backups a recovery on a separate instance is necessary - otherwise you never know if you
could actually perform the recovery.
- Lars

Generated by Jive on 2014-06-08+02:00

7