How to start saposcol forcefully on Unix

SAPOSCOL ( SAP OS collector ) is program which collects the Operating System information and displays the information in Operating System Monitor ( transaction STo6 ).

The operating system collector SAPOSCOL is a stand-alone program that runs in the operating system background. It runs independently of SAP instances exactly once per monitored host. SAPOSCOL collects data about operating system resources, including:

Usage of virtual and physical memory
CPU utilization
Utilization of physical disks and file systems
Resource usage of running processes

The SAPOSCOL can be stopped/started through either SAP (through Operating System Monitor or transaction code ST06 -> Operating system Collector -> Start) or Operating System. However, sometimes it may happen when you try to start the SAPOSCOL it gives you the message it’s already running. Like in example below.

SIDADM> saposcol -l
***********************************************************************
* This is Saposcol Version COLL XX.XX
* Usage: saposcol -l: Start OS Collector
* saposcol -k: Stop OS Collector
* saposcol -d: OS Collector Dialog Mode
* saposcol -s: OS Collector Status
* The OS Collector (PID XXXXXX) is already running …..
************************************************************************

If you try to see the status of SAPOSCOL through command saposcol -s, you will see the status and if you try to grep the process with command ps -ef|grep -i saposcol, it will not show the process.
So, what do we do now?

There is another parameter of SAPOSCOL which is not documented in it’s menu list and that is force option (-f).

All you need to do is start SAPOSCOL with command saposcol -f, it will start the process forcefully. Once it’s started stop the process through saposcol -k and start it normally through saposcol or with option -l . Now, your SAPOSCOL is running and collecting the OS information for you. I have tried this on Unix and it works not sure about Windows though.

Read more about SAPOSCOL

Update: If your SAPOSCOL still doesn’t start with the above steps then follow the steps below:

Start SAPOSCOL in dialog mode with saposcol -d option. You will get a prompt to type further command, help command can be used to see what all commands are available.

Try to kill the SAPOSCOL with kill command. After it’s killed execute command leave, this will clean shared memory ( Make sure the SAPOSCOL is not running).

Start the SAPOSCOL with command launch and quit from dialog mode.