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# Monitoring overview

## Monitoring​

Monitoring & observation (Checks and Reporting) is key to understanding the health of your SAP world. Avantra has had monitoring at its core since the start. Avantra is designed from the core to excel at landscape observation across 5 types of monitored objects:

- Server (foundational object for all others)
- Database
- SAP System
- SAP Instance
- Cloud Service ( and/or 3rd party API endpoints)

A grouping of monitored systems including any or all of the above is called a System Selector. System selectors can be dynamic where the contents of the group are based on criteria (e.g. all systems that are running a Windows operating system) or they can be static where you decide which systems are included.

Each of these monitored objects is monitored and observed across:

- Standard Checks (Out of the box)
- User-defined Checks (custom checks)
- Dashboards and Reporting
- Business Services (technical mapping of processes across multiple systems)
- Monitoring Parameters (dynamic thresholds)
- Parameter Sets (collections of configuration applied dynamically)

### Predictive Analytics​

Predictive Analytics is the Avantra Enterprise Edition approach to “spiky”, “bursty”, or “flapping” monitoring situations for checks based on time series data. It combines Machine Learning algorithms to predict future trends with classic threshold based monitoring.

note

This function is only available with the Avantra Enterprise Edition. For more information about editions please see the Avantra Editions Matrix.

There are situations where thresholds are too static, or become too strict. The intention of thresholds is to define a long term separator between good and not so good. Usually a situation only becomes critical if a threshold is exceeded over a longer period of time. Whenever resource usage is spiky, or there are usage bursts, thresholds can be exceeded for a short period of time, although this does not constitute a critical situation.

From a technical perspective it tricky is to decide: is a certain situation only a usage spike, or is it the beginning of a longer term problem?

Predictive Analytics tries to remediate this dilemma. The Avantra agent applies ML based algorithms to understand usage patterns and to predict - at every given point in time - how the usage will evolve in the near future. These predictions are used to determine a trend whenever the agent evaluates a check. And this trend is taken into account, in addition to the defined thresholds.

If a threshold is exceeded and the predictive analytics engine projects the situation clears again within a short period of time, the check status will not be changed. Only if the situation is projected to get worse the check status is changed immediately.

## Compliance, governance and auditing and security​

Avantra provides a bunch of features that are really helpful in this context:

- System Change Auto Detection tracks all important changes within your SAP System.
- You can monitor the profile settings of your SAP System and Database continuously and compare them to a set of target values.
- Avantra automatically verifies if special administrative users in your SAP System are locked or have the password changed from their default values.
- Monitoring the audit log of the SAP ABAP systems, user authorizations and profiles (only available in the Avantra Pro Edition).
- Monitoring of System Change Options and Client Settings
- Finally, the rich toolbox of Custom Checks comes in handy in these scenarios, in particular, the ability to run arbitrary SQL statements on the managed Database and evaluate them according to your needs.