Causes, Impacts
- The following are some of the factors to be considered when looking for the best method for system backup and restore:
- RTO and RPO policies
- System Availability/Disaster recovery approach
- Available budget.
- System backup is a routine task of a BASIS consultant and as such it requires adequate monitoring and administration. Manual checking of backups is insufficient due to possible human error, thus finding a way to automate the process and monitor its status should be the objective of any database administrator.
- An appropriate database strategy must be in place to avoid the risk of data loss. Data might be lost or corrupted due to several reasons such as:
- Disks crash
- Power failure
- Human error
- Virus damage
- Natural disasters
- It is insufficient to simply schedule backups. You must also check regularly whether they were completed successfully or not as omitting such a check could have serious consequences on business operations.
- Risks associated with data loss can be adequately mitigated by automating the monitoring of backup status and alerts in your system. This will eliminate the cost resulting from database damage and time wasted doing a manual check of backup status.
How is it monitored?
- Backups can be monitored using Solution Manager.
- SAP backups can be scheduled and viewed using DB13, DB12, DBACOCKPIT.
- HANA customers can use HANA Studio’s Backup Console and/or HANA Cockpit to initiate backups, or schedule scripts provided by SAP and adapted to each system for backup. While the backup runs, it can be monitored inside Studio or via SQL scripts.
- SAP on Oracle customers can use BRTOOLS for backup which is fully integrated into DB13 scheduler. BRTOOLS can also help with the restore process.
- SAP provides backint (backup integration) for 3rd-party vendors (such as CommVault, HP DPM, Veeam, Azure Backup DPM, NetBackup etc.) to integrate their data protection tools with SAP supported database backups. So backups can be invoked using standard SAP scheduler or with the vendor data protection scheduler. Either way, the backup and archive log backups should be available to SAP in standard format visible to CCMS.
- Cron jobs is still widely used in customer who run SAP on Linux/UNIX, but this lacks central control and ability to monitor.
For the main topic;
SAP BASIS and Monitoring