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 3.6 (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 3.6

Version 3.6 of Google Cloud's Agent for SAP introduces the following:

  • (Preview) Striped disk support for snapshot based backup and recovery of SAP HANA: You can use the disk snapshot feature of the agent to back up and restore SAP HANA databases where the /hana/data volume is hosted on more than one disk.

    To use this feature enhancement, you need to contact Customer Care. For more information, see Backup and recovery for SAP HANA by using disk snapshots.

  • Updates to SAP HANA monitoring metrics:

    • The metric sap/hanamonitoring/backups/snapshot has been introduced. It shows the state of the last complete disk snapshot based data backup. It includes the labels backup_id and entry_type_name.
    • The metric sap/hanamonitoring/backups/data has been fixed. It was showing the ID of the Backint based backup. It's been fixed to show the state of the last complete Backint based backup. Also, from version 3.6, this metric includes the labels backup_id and entry_type_name.

    For more information, see the descriptions of these metrics in SAP HANA monitoring metrics.

  • The Backint configuration parameter custom_time supports the value UTCNow+NUMBERd, which lets you set a future date for the Custom_Time metadata of the backups you upload to Cloud Storage. For more information, see the description of the custom_time parameter in Configuration parameters.

  • Enhancements to the agent's configureinstance command, which improve the performance on SAP HANA scale-out systems running on Compute Engine bare metal instances.

Version 3.5

Version 3.5 of Google Cloud's Agent for SAP introduces the following:

  • Support for setting up observability for your SAP workloads using Workload Manager. For more information, see SAP system discovery.

  • When you enable the collection of SAP HANA monitoring metrics, the agent additionally collects the following metrics by default:

    • sap/hanamonitoring/transactions/blocked
    • sap/hanamonitoring/backups/data
    • sap/hanamonitoring/backups/log
    • sap/hanamonitoring/memory/unloads
    • sap/hanamonitoring/disk/readtime
    • sap/hanamonitoring/disk/writetime

    For information about these metrics, see SAP HANA monitoring metrics.

  • Enhanced the Workload Manager evaluation metric sap/validation/hana. Additional label-value pairs are collected as part of this metric to support Workload Manager evaluations related to SAP HANA backups.

  • On Linux, you can now disable and enable the agent's systemd service by running configuration commands. For more information, see Disable or enable the agent.

  • Fixed the behavior of the Process Monitoring metric sap/hana/ha/availability. When the secondary SAP HANA instance was stopped, the agent instance installed on it was incorrectly reporting the value 0 for this metric. It's now been fixed to show the appropriate value, depending on its state. For more information, see the description of this metric in Process Monitoring metrics.

Version 3.4

Version 3.4 of Google Cloud's Agent for SAP introduces the following:

  • Workload performance diagnostics: To help Cloud Customer Care in accelerating troubleshooting any performance issues with your SAP workloads that run on Google Cloud, a performance diagnostics tool is built into Google Cloud's Agent for SAP.

    For more information, see Workload performance diagnostics.

  • Backint related enhancement: From version 3.4, you can specify the custom-time parameter in your PARAMETERS.json file. This parameter sets the Custom-Time metadata for your backups that are uploaded to Cloud Storage. For more information, see the description of the parameter in Configuration parameters.

  • Disk snapshot related enhancements: From version 3.4, the following enhancements are available:

    • While running the hanadiskbackup command, you can use the -confirm-data-snapshot-after-create argument to specify when snapshot creation is confirmed to SAP HANA. For more information, see this argument's description in Create a disk snapshot based backup.

    • While running the hanadiskrestore command:

      • The agent can auto-detect the disk hosting your /hana/data directory. This means that the arguments -data-disk-name and -data-disk-zone are optional from version 3.4. However, if you specify these arguments while running the hanadiskrestore command, then they override the agent's auto-detection.
      • If you're creating a new disk to host the /hana/data directory, then you can specify the -labels-on-detached-disk arguments. This lets you add label-value pairs to the disks that are detached during recovery.
      • You can let the agent send to Cloud Monitoring the duration that it takes for the recovery operation to complete. You can do this by using the send_metrics_to_monitoring boolean argument.

      For more information, see Supported arguments for disk restoration.

Version 3.3

Version 3.3 of Google Cloud's Agent for SAP introduces the following:

  • Disk snapshot related enhancement: From version 3.3, when you create a disk snapshot based backup by running the hanadiskbackup command, the agent can auto-detect the disk hosting your /hana/data directory.

    This means that the arguments -source-disk and -source-disk-zone are optional from version 3.3. However, if you specify these arguments while running the hanadiskbackup command, then they override the agent's auto-detection.

  • Backint related enhancements:

    • To support activities such as lifecycle management of backups, you can associate key-value pairs as metadata with the backup files in your Cloud Storage bucket. You can do this by including the metadata parameter while running the configurebackint command. For more information, see Configuration parameters.
    • To automatically shorten the path to the files in your Cloud Storage bucket, you can specify the shorten_folder_path boolean parameter while running the configurebackint command. For more information, see Configuration parameters.
    • You can let the agent send Backint related metrics to Cloud Monitoring. These metrics indicate the status and throughput of the files uploaded and downloaded during Backint operations. You can do this by using the send_metrics_to_monitoring boolean parameter. For more information, see Backint metrics collection.
    • While testing the agent's Backint related self diagnostics tool, you can use the optional parameters diagnose_file_max_size_gb and diagnose_tmp_directory. For information about these parameter, see Configuration parameters.

  • Support for hdbuserstore key based authentication: To authenticate the database user account that the agent uses to query your SAP HANA database, you can specify an hdbuserstore key to the hdbuserstore_key configuration parameter. This option is available when you perform the following:

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 Compute Engine instance 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:

  • Backup and recovery for SAP HANA by using Backint: From version 3.0, you can back up and recover your SAP HANA database by using the agent's Backint feature. This feature is available for 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 Backup and recovery for SAP HANA by using Backint.
  • Backup and recovery for SAP HANA by using disk snapshots: From version 3.0, you can back up and recover SAP HANA databases running on Google Cloud by using the agent's disk snapshot feature. For more information about this feature, see Backup and recovery for SAP HANA by using disk snapshots.
  • 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 Compute Engine 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.