JSMON the "secret tool" :-)

I had previously touched on troubleshooting the system when it is not possible to do so via the SAP GUI. That was in the case of the ABAP engine.

In the same case but this time for a JAVA system i.e Employee Self Service/Manager Self service , Supplier Relationship management portal or any other portal system , there is a very helpful tool that not many admins are aware of cal JSMON.

For systems running on UNIX you will need to grep the SAP java process by using either ps -ef | grep sap or s -ef | grep java as <sid>adm user.Then identify the process with this path
pf=/usr/sap/<SID>/SYS/profile/<SID>_J00_<system name> . Once you find the path , then type the command jsmon followed by the path above ...i.e >jsmon pf=/usr/sap/<SID>/SYS/profile/<SID>_J00_<system name>

the image below shows what you should get. Thereafter you can execute a couple of commands which all need to start with jsmon e.g and most important is >jsmon view

This gives you information on the instance state and a good place to start is to check if all processes are running. If the system is down it may show "some processes running or run mode "invalid license"  , for the former error you may try to restart the SAP JAVA instance and for the latter you need to check the license validity in the SAP Portal NWA, you may need to apply a new license if it has expired.