Monitoring Requirements of Azure for SAP Workloads

By Ashwin Venugopal -

 



Overview

According to the Microsoft Azure Support Prerequisites, you must enable built-in SAP monitors about configuration as well as resource utilization from the underlying Azure infrastructure for full support. Hence, all the Azure instances that hosts software and related DBMS systems must be set up as follows:
  • The Azure Monitoring Extension for SAP is deployed and correctly configured.
  • Data from the Azure Monitoring Extension for SAP is visible in the SAP NetWeaver system. 

The following technical requirement should be available for use of the Azure Monitoring Extension for SAP:

  • An active route to the internet is required by the Azure Virtual Machine instance to easily access the Azure Extension Pool which also need the setting up of Internet proxies for the Virtual Machine Instance before deploying the Azure Virtual Machine Extension for SAP.

  • The SAP Enhanced Monitoring is deployed which consists of the enhanced SAP Host Agent and monitors transaction of ST06 to precisely include Azure performance counters.

Microsoft provides the monitoring of CPU, memory, network bandwidth, and disks space for SAP HANA on Azure (Large Instances). The server often comes with the preloaded system diagnostic tools for the Type II SKUs of the HANA Large Instances and these diagnostics tools can be utilized to perform the system health check.

Licensing, pricing, and support of Azure for SAP workloads

Customers must procure appropriate licenses for SAP software to be deployed to Azure while the pricing of Azure resources and licensing of the non-SAP software always follow the standard Azure pricing as well as licensing rules. 

As per the support requirements, if you want to operate SAP systems on Microsoft Azure VMs, you should choose one of the two support options which are as follows:

  • The first one is Professional Direct, which offers the bare minimum support level, appropriate if you only require support from Microsoft for Azure itself.
  • The second one is Microsoft Premier Support, which is recommended if SAP workloads are based on the Windows Server and/or SQL server which in turn offers the best enterprise-level support for Azure, Windows and/or SQL server.

Besides, while running SAP software on Linux Azure VMs, customers should satisfy the separate support requirements SAP has for operating SAP systems on the corresponding Linux distributions. 

SAP HANA on Azure (Large Instance)

SAP HANA on Azure (Large Instance) usage always requires the Microsoft Premier support contract and if you want to use HANA Large Instance units with 384 or more CPUs, you should extend the Premier support contract to include Azure Rapid Response. 








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