What's new with Google Cloud's Agent for SAP

This document lists significant changes to Google Cloud's Agent for SAP.

Google Cloud's Agent for SAP is the successor to the Google Cloud agents: Google Cloud's monitoring agent for SAP NetWeaver, Google Cloud monitoring agent for SAP HANA, and Cloud Storage Backint agent for SAP HANA.

If you are using any of these Google Cloud agents, then we recommend that you upgrade to using version 3.2 (latest) of Google Cloud's Agent for SAP at your earliest convenience. For details about Google Cloud's Agent for SAP, see the Google Cloud's Agent for SAP planning guide.

To view all of the announcements from SAP on Google Cloud, see Release notes.

Version 3.2

Version 3.2 of Google Cloud's Agent for SAP introduces the following:

  • Default collection of Workload Manager evaluation metrics at no cost:

    • From version 3.2, by default, new installations of the agent are enabled to collect the Workload Manager evaluation metrics. You don't incur any cost to collect these metrics. However, you'd still need to perform other configurations to let the agent collect the Workload Manager evaluation metrics.
    • If you're updating to version 3.2, then to collect the Workload Manager evaluation metrics, you'd need to provide the concerned service account the Workload Manager Insights Writer (roles/workloadmanager.insightWriter) role.

    For more information, see Configure Workload Manager evaluation metrics collection.

  • Configuration commands: From version 3.2, in addition to manually editing the configuration file and restarting the agent, you can use commands to configure the agent and automatically restart it. For more information, see Configuration commands for Google Cloud's Agent for SAP.

  • Backint related enhancements:

    • You can enable parallel uploading of backups to a Cloud Storage bucket that has a retention policy by using the xml_multipart_upload parameter in combination with the parallel_streams parameter.
    • While uploading backups to a Cloud Storage bucket, you can specify the storage class that is associated with the uploaded backup by using the storage_class parameter.

    For information about the Backint configuration parameters, see Configuration parameters.

  • Disk snapshot related enhancements: From version 3.2, while creating disk snapshot based backups:

  • New Process monitoring metrics: sap/pacemaker and sap/hana/volumes. For more information, see Process Monitoring metrics.

Version 3.1

Version 3.1 of Google Cloud's Agent for SAP introduces the following:

  • For discovering SAP system information, the enable_workload_discovery and enable_discovery configuration parameters have been introduced. These parameters let the agent collect information about the SAP products running on your VM or Bare Metal Solution server. For more information, see the agent installation guide for your scenario.
  • For the Backint feature of the agent, the folder_prefix and recovery_folder_prefix parameters have been introduced. These parameters let you organize backups of multiple SAP HANA systems in the same Cloud Storage bucket. For more information, see Configure Backint based backup and recovery for SAP HANA.

Version 3.0

Version 3.0 of Google Cloud's Agent for SAP introduces the following features:

  • Backint based backup and recovery for SAP HANA: From version 3.0, you can use this feature to perform backup and recovery operations for your SAP HANA systems running on Google Cloud, on Bare Metal Solution, on premises, or on other cloud platforms. For more information about this feature of the agent, see Backint based backup and recovery for SAP HANA.
  • Disk snapshot based backup and recovery for SAP HANA: From version 3.0, you can use this feature to perform backup and recovery operations for your SAP HANA systems running on Google Cloud. For more information about this feature, see Disk snapshot based backup and recovery for SAP HANA.
  • Collection of the latest set of Workload Manager evaluation metrics: From version 3.0, when the feature is enabled, the agent collects the latest set of Workload Manager evaluation metrics without requiring you to update the agent. Consequently, this lets you seamlessly evaluate your SAP systems against any new best practices introduced in Workload Manager. If you need to turn off this behavior, then set the fetch_latest_config configuration parameter to false.

For more information about version 3.0 of Google Cloud's Agent for SAP, see Google Cloud's Agent for SAP planning guide.

Version 2.8

Version 2.8 of Google Cloud's Agent for SAP additionally collects the SAP Host Agent metrics Guaranteed IOPS and Guaranteed Throughput for Google Cloud Hyperdisk volumes.

Version 2.7

Version 2.7 of Google Cloud's Agent for SAP introduces the following:

  • Fixed the handling of SAP HANA database passwords that contain special characters. They are now encoded in double quotes, as mandated by SAP.
  • The sap/networkstats family of Process Monitoring metrics that are related to TCP network. For more information, see Process Monitoring metrics.
  • For visualizing the SAP HANA monitoring metrics collected by agent versions 2.0 or later, the Agent for SAP - Detailed HANA Overview and Agent for SAP - HANA performance dashboards. For information about these dashboards, see View the collected metrics.

Version 2.6

Version 2.6 of Google Cloud's Agent for SAP introduces the following:

  • Fixes for the collection of Workload Manager evaluation metrics that are related to SAP HANA and Pacemaker instances.
  • From this version, for agent instances running on Bare Metal Solution servers, the agent configuration parameter instance_id has been replaced by the parameter instance_name. For more information, see Install the agent.

  • Configuration parameter updates for the collection of the Process Monitoring metrics:

    • process_metrics_frequency: From version 2.6, this parameter determines the collection frequency for the following fast-changing Process Monitoring metrics: sap/hana/availability, sap/hana/ha/availability, and sap/nw/availability. All other Process Monitoring metrics are now referred to as slow-changing Process Monitoring metrics.
    • slow_process_metrics_frequency: This parameter determines the collection frequency of all other Process Monitoring metrics.
    • process_metrics_to_skip: This parameter determines the Process Monitoring metrics that the agent skips from collecting. This parameter accepts a comma-separated value of Process Monitoring metric names. For example: "process_metrics_to_skip": ["/sap/nw/abap/sessions", "/sap/nw/abap/rfc"].

    For more information about the configuration parameters related to the collection Process Monitoring metrics, see:

Version 2.5

Version 2.5 of Google Cloud's Agent for SAP introduces the following:

  • A new metric, sap/validation/hanasecurity, which indicates the collection of SAP HANA database metrics for Workload Manager evaluation. For more information, see Workload Manager evaluation metrics.
  • Enhancement to use the SOAP interface of sapcontrol for the collection of the Process Monitoring metrics.
  • For the collection of Process Monitoring metrics, included fixes in SAP system discovery to ignore commented entries.

Version 2.4

Version 2.4 of Google Cloud's Agent for SAP includes bug fixes for the collection of the Workload Manager evaluation metric, sap/validation/corosync.

Version 2.3

Version 2.3 of Google Cloud's Agent for SAP includes bug fixes for SAP system discovery sending data to Cloud Logging.

Version 2.2

Version 2.2 of Google Cloud's Agent for SAP includes bug fixes for SAP system discovery.

Version 2.1

Version 2.1 of Google Cloud's Agent for SAP includes the following features and bug fixes:

  • SAP system discovery: Identifies all Google Cloud platform resources related to the SAP system and sends this information to Cloud Logging.
  • Support bundle feature: Facilitates the collection of necessary information, such as logs and error strings, to improve supportability.
  • Bug fixes in the collection of Workload Manager evaluation metrics.

Version 2.0

Version 2.0 of Google Cloud's Agent for SAP introduces the following features:

  • Collection of SAP HANA monitoring metrics: On Linux, you can configure Google Cloud's Agent for SAP to collect the SAP HANA monitoring metrics. These metrics provide you visibility into the performance, availability, and health of your SAP HANA instances and the underlying infrastructure. For more information, see SAP HANA monitoring metrics.

For more information about version 2.0 of Google Cloud's Agent for SAP, see Google Cloud's Agent for SAP planning guide.

Version 1.6

Version 1.6 of Google Cloud's Agent for SAP includes the following bug fixes:

  • Fix to collect the Process Monitoring metric /sap/nw/enq/locks/usercountowner from all applicable instance types - ASCS and ERS.
  • Fixes for accessing the cloud_properties configuration of agent instances running on Bare Metal Solution servers.

Version 1.5

Version 1.5 of Google Cloud's Agent for SAP includes the following bug fixes:

  • Fix for the agent instances on Linux to always overwrite the systemd service file contents, which ensure that the agent capabilities works as expected during version updates.
  • Fix in Linux command-line execution while parsing the command's exit code. This fix prevents the agent from shutting down in some edge cases.

Version 1.4

Version 1.4 of Google Cloud's Agent for SAP includes the following bug fixes and features:

  • Added a new startdaemon sub-command to run the agent in daemon mode.
    • This change is non-impacting to the normal operation of the agent.
  • Prevented changes to the agent configuration file from being overwritten during updates.
  • Fixed sending time-value logs to Cloud Logging.
  • Fixed the collection of Workload Manager maintenance mode and the Process Monitoring metric sap/nw/abap/sessions.
  • New metrics that the agent can collect:
    • /sap/nw/enq/locks/usercountowner: a Process Monitoring metric that monitors the enqueue locks in SAP NetWeaver systems.

Version 1.3

Version 1.3 of Google Cloud's Agent for SAP includes the following bug fixes and features:

  • Fixed the collection of SAP HANA related Workload Manager evaluation metrics.
  • The agent's logs are now redirected to Cloud Logging by default. You no longer need to do any configuration for this.
  • Bug fix in Process Monitoring metrics to use REPLICATION_MODE to determine whether an SAP HANA node is primary or secondary. This improves metric accuracy for HANA secondary systems.

Version 1.2

Version 1.2 of Google Cloud's Agent for SAP includes the following bug fixes and features:

  • The Process Monitoring metrics now consider the status of the enq_replicator and enq_server services to determine the availability of SAP NetWeaver instances.
  • New metrics that the agent can collect:
    • /sap/infra/migration: an infrastructure migration metric that indicates if a VM instance is undergoing a live migration.
    • /sap/agent/health: a metric that shows the agent's health in Cloud Monitoring.
    • /sap/agent/cpu/utilization and /sap/agent/memory/utilization: these Cloud Monitoring metrics enable you to monitor the CPU and memory resources used by the agent.

Version 1.1

Version 1.1 of Google Cloud's Agent for SAP fixes a Workload Manager evaluation related bug to strip double quotes from Linux OS metric value.

Version 1.0

Version 1.0 of Google Cloud's Agent for SAP introduces the following features:

  • Collection of SAP Host Agent metrics: Google Cloud's Agent for SAP collects and sends all the required information to the SAP Host Agent, as mandated by SAP. For more information, see the SAP Host Agent metrics.

  • Collection of Process Monitoring metrics: On Linux, you can configure Google Cloud's Agent for SAP to collect Process Monitoring metrics for your SAP applications and their runtime states. This information helps you troubleshoot the issues related to your SAP workloads. For more information, see the Process Monitoring metrics.

  • Collection of Workload Manager evaluation metrics: On Linux, you can configure Google Cloud's Agent for SAP to collect Workload Manager evaluation metrics that are required to enable the Workload Manager services for your SAP workloads. For more information, see the Workload Manager evaluation metrics.