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The increasing complexity of business operations has heightened the need for shock resistance amongst businesses. Performance and reliability have emerged as the cornerstone principles guiding their operations. Nowhere is this more evident than in the realm of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, where SAP reigns supreme. Encompassing 77% of worldwide business transactions and with 150 million cloud users, SAP systems serve as the backbone of countless organisations globally. These systems ensure that the execution of critical functions such as finance and supply chain to human resources and customer relationship management happen without a hitch.
Given the pivotal role of SAP systems in ensuring business success, any performance issues can create significant consequences. From unforeseen downtime to security breaches, these issues extend beyond mere inconveniences to potentially devastating business outcomes.
The SAP monitoring challenge
To combat performance bottlenecks, IT teams deploy application monitoring solutions to observe SAP, but traditional monitoring tools miss the mark. The challenge is that just like every other system, SAP environments are increasingly distributed, being split between private and public clouds, which compromises the ability to understand performance and troubleshoot issues when they arise. Equally, SAP’s proprietary programming language—ABAP adds further complexity to the mix, as the code is stored in the database and closely tied to other SAP components making it difficult to pinpoint the root cause of performance issues.
The monitoring challenge becomes more acute when significant changes occur in the SAP environment like migration to the cloud and platform upgrades where it is vital to spot performance gains (and potential losses). Similarly, during times where SAP will experience spikes in traffic like holiday shopping or other seasonal events, ensuring consistent performance is mission critical.
While SAP’s own native monitoring tool, SAP Solution Manager (SolMan) has made great strides in recent years, it still has its limitations. It’s common for users to report high levels of alert noise that obfuscate genuine issues, while the lack of support for non-SAP systems limits the depth and breadth of observability.
The reality is that SAP users need end-to-end observability of their SAP application delivery chain. Every interconnect, API and dependency needs to be considered and monitored to ensure the highest levels of performance.
So, what is the response to modern SAP monitoring?
End-to-end observability for SAP using AppDynamics
SAP Monitoring from Cisco AppDynamics is revolutionising SAP performance monitoring. As part of Cisco’s Observability Platform, it is redefining how businesses assess the performance impact of their entire SAP landscape and how they can assert control over it.
How does it work?
By focusing on four key elements: visibility, real-time monitoring, comprehensive insights into the business context of SAP performance and the assessment of hybrid transactions across SAP and non-SAP landscapes.
Improved visibility
With SAP Monitoring from AppDynamics, businesses gain a comprehensive overview of their entire IT landscape, including SAP and non-SAP applications. This enables businesses to clearly see and understand their upstream and downstream service dependencies alongside user experience within SAP.
Furthermore, it provides businesses with out of the box dashboards built specifically for the kind of SAP landscapes that they need to monitor and optimise. This enables them to evaluate the overall health of their system- application server, HANA, DB, key background jobs, IDocs and PI systems amongst others—whilst getting access to real-time mapping of business transactions across distributed SAP systems.
This is made possible by providing genuine code level insight into ABAP. This ensures pinpoint accuracy for issue discovery and a dramatic reduction in MTTR when troubleshooting.
Real-time performance monitoring
With a dynamic baseline capability, SAP Monitoring from AppDynamics frees businesses from manually updating static thresholds as priorities change. Furthermore, AppDynamics’ AI facility removes the alert noise generated by traditional performance monitoring tools and the unwelcomed false positives that come as a result. This helps IT teams be more targeted with where they invest time and resources for troubleshooting duties when problems do arise.
Business context
AppDynamics helps to evaluate in real-time the health of the underlying business transactions SAP is powering. Transactions like abandoned carts, lost sales and increased delivery costs that emerge from critical systems not performing at optimum levels or being offline—are brought home to IT and business decision makers. Insights can be shared using different types of dashboards depending on the data consumer, which ensures that the real performance impacts, both good and bad, are revealed to a business and measured by the metrics that count.
Monitor hybrid transactions
Most important of all, AppDynamics can detect and monitor hybrid business transactions—that is transactions that span both SAP and non-SAP landscapes.
What this means is that AppDynamics can automatically discover and track business transactions no matter where they are in the application delivery chain. Each transaction is tagged and followed throughout its journey using the agents deployed by AppDynamics in SAP and non-SAP environments. These agents capture performance related data and enable IT teams to understand where bottlenecks are occurring and if the issue exists within SAP or another application or interconnect. These insights can then be aggregated into dashboards and reporting insights that extend beyond the SAP environment singularly.
AppDynamics: closing the SAP monitoring gap
SAP Monitoring from AppDynamics is closing the gap on many of the monitoring challenges SAP users are facing today. To learn more, or to see the solution in action, get in touch with the Perform IT team.