Hi, my name is Denys van Kempen, SAP HANA Academy.
You are watching a video tutorial that is part of a series about the SAP Business Technology
Platform certification SAP Certified Technology Associate - SAP HANA
Cloud Provisioning and Administration.
This tutorial covers the topic area SAP HANA Cockpit for SAP HANA Cloud
This video was recorded in August 2022.
For the latest tutorials on the topic, please check the playlist.
As a reminder, here we have the topic areas SAP HANA Cockpit for SAP HANA Cloud has a
13% weight, about 10 questions and this includes questions about working with the HANA cockpit,
alerting, monitoring, and SQL workloads.
The SAP HANA cockpit for SAP HANA Cloud is the same tool as the SAP HANA cockpit for
the SAP HANA platform on-premises, with some minor differences.
On premises, you need to install and configure the cockpit, register databases, add users,
etc. but with SAP HANA Cloud, the cockpit comes preconfigured and is associated with
your SAP HANA Cloud instance.
You cannot use it for any other purpose.
To acccess the cockpit, we can select the tile of the instance in the SAP HANA Cloud
view of the SAP BTP Cockpit, same name, different tool, under Actions, open in SAP HANA Cockpit,
to monitor and administer or we can access the cockpit from the SAP HANA CLoud Central
app from the elipsis menu Enter your credentials
The first time you connect to the database instance, the only candidate, the only known
user is the DBADMIN account with the password set when the instance was created, we saw
this in the previous video, don’t forget the password, by the way, there is no way
for recover, and as with the database superuser SYSTEM account, used on premises, SAP recommends
to use the DBADMIN user only for the initial setup, to create additional administration
accounts, with limited authorisations, and to disable DBADMIN when done.
Upon first access, this will register the datbase instance
The cockpit opens with the Database Overview app,
we can switch applications here in the header, there are, time of recording, 52 different
apps, as the term goes, a little less when compared to the cockpit on-premises as not
all functionality is accessible or relevant.
The database overview app has different views, monitoring, administration, security and user
management, and all.
This provides some focus to the app.
When selecting all, about 30 tiles are displayed, a little less, some only containing links
to more apps.
You are not expected to be intimately familiar with all of these apps for the exam, we will
highlight the most important ones.
Let’s start with Database Information
shows the database version: 4.0
You may know that the platform on-premises is version 2.0
the version of HANA Cloud, the overall service with the modules database, and data lake
the QRC, the quarterly release, Q2 22,
last update
and installed plugins
You can select the tile to open the app,
this provides even more information, like the version history, but mostly this will
be of interest for support only.
Let’s return to the overview
Another app of interest is Manage Services.
We access the app from the Services tile.
Displays the status of the services, number of hosts, which in case of SAP HANA Cloud,
will always be one.
Clicking the tile or the Manage Services button opens the app, although there is actually
nothing to manage, the privileges required to stop or restart services have not been
granted to DBADMIN, and hence we have read-only view
Those familiar with the SAP HANA platform will recognise the services,
there is a daemon to act as a, as it is called, a watchdog; restarting services in case they
do not respond or are stopped
the name server hosts the system database associated with this HANA Cloud database instance,
which corresponds to a tenant database.
the system database is managed by SAP, not accessible, but how this works exactly is
beyond the scope of the exam
the compile server compiles SQLScript code, before execution
these are all shared services, which has some meaning for the platform edition on premises
as this supports multiple tenant databases
For HANA Cloud, there is only a single tenant database, so there is not much to share.
Then we have the indexserver service, which provides access to our HANA Cloud database
instance, and for this reason has a SQL port.
However, to access the instance we need to provide the endpoint, with port 443 for secure
TLS access.
All other ports are blocked.
The dpserver service is used for data provisioning, replication and federation, smart data integration
and smart data access, SDI and SDA.
When you select the indicator bars in the CPU column we are directed to the Performance
Monitor app with the CPU view selected
and when we return
Same for the Memory column, although in this case the Memory Analysis app opens
The columns displayed in the view are configurable,
select the gear icon, this works the same in most apps.
Back to the overview
Administration View
We will cover backup and recovery in a separate video about SAP HANA Cloud management
There is an app to help you configure table distribution and partitioning
You can view the current table distribution
As this concerns a new instance without any data, there is not much too see
From the tile elipsis, we can generate a table redistribution plan and edit the table placement
rules, although this is more relevant for a multiple host SAP HANA platform system,
less for a single host SAP HANA Cloud instance.
There are tiles for smart data access and the smart data integration, displaying information,
and with links to the database explorer, which we will cover in another tutorial
Manage SQL Performance provides access to the Statement Hints app
Saved Plans
and Data Cache
but again, as we are running a vanilla instance with no data, not much to see, but tuning
SQL statements is not in scope for the exam
From the Database Administration card we can access the Database Configuration app
There is a lot to configure here, 281 parameters
stored in different configuration files, the INI files,
we recognize dpserver, indexserver, and some more,
we can add new parameters
or override values
which provides some information about what the parameter does,
and assumes you know what you are doing
database parameters are not in scope for the exam, but you migh be expected to know that
they exist and that there is an app to configure them
same for workload classes
this enables us to separate workloads, long running batch jobs from interactive user queries
you can create workload classes
set the resource limits
and, optionally, make a mapping
for a particular schema, application user, client, and so on
to save time, you can export and import the configuration accross database instances
this is all extensively documented, of course
so if you interested, here you can find more information
but for the exam, you are not expected to have mastered workload classes.
Just know it exists.
You can expect a few questions about alerting and diagnostics
the card here provides access to alert definitions
time of recording, there are 61 alerts defined
you can filter using the header bar, as with some other apps
select the alert for more information
there is a Check Now button to run the alert
and an edit button,
to configure the alert
you can deactivate the schedule, to disable
configure the interval
change the thresholds
but not the proposed solution
and you can find this all documented in the SAP HANA Cloud Database Administration with
SAP HANA Cockpit guide
That’s it for the Administration view of the Database Overview app.
In a subsequent video we will cover the Database Explorer, which has several links here on
this page.
Let’s return to the Monitoring view
Here we have a card for Alerts with a link to the Alerts Definitions app
and when we select the card, the Alerts app opens, showing us all alerts triggered.
As with most apps, we can filter using the header, and configure the table view using
the gear icon, sort and filter.
Alerts come in different priorities: info, low, medium, high, and error
There a different categories you can use to filter
Back to the overview
There are three tiles with live charts on CPU, memory, and disk usage
with links to the performance monitor
and, in case of Memory Usage, to a number of additional memory monitoring apps.
For an in-memory database, memory is the most important resource, so this should not come
as a surprise
The performance monitor also has different views, and you can define and save your own,
typical perf mon graph
you can export and import data
use any of the presets
and in the table view panel view alerts, running statement, expensive statements, and background
jobs, which, as we have seen, also have dedicated apps but here we can see the effect of the
activities on CPU performance
again, there is not much going on, but you get the idea
here, for example, we have the output of the SQL Statements app, with tabs for active statements,
SQL plan cache, and expensive statement, also accesible from the related apps pop-up
blocked transactions, for example
The three cards also have a link to the Analyze Workloads app,
which shows top SQL statements, background jobs, a timeline, and threads,
and this is getting a bit more technical with primary and secondary dimensions, thread types,
methods, and states, semaphores ..
all documented in the guide
with the different apps listed and explained, you might want to browse the guide a bit to
familiarise yourself with SAP HANA Cloud database monitoring
Finally, for memory usage, we can also access the buffer cache monitor,
You may recall that we have hot data in-memory, cold data in the data lake and warm data in
the buffer cache, using NSE, native storage extension, technology
this is where you monitor how the cache is used and configure the cache size
again, as with most topics we discussed in this video, you are not expected to have mastered
all of this
However, you should have a general understanding of what we can do with the SAP HANA cockpit
for SAP HANA Cloud, the different apps, and the purpose they serve.
and that’s it
take a look at the documentation for more information.
You can find the links to the resources mentioned in the description of this video below.
This video tutorial was recorded by Denys van Kempen, SAP HANA Academy.
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