Today, SAP is a vital part of business operations, giving enterprise companies the ability to deliver goods and services to customers around the world. From frontend to backend, several business applications depend completely on SAP to run their most critical business operations.
As IT environments become more complex and dynamic, IT teams are finding it increasingly challenging to manage the availability and performance of both SAP and non-SAP applications. Partial visibility into SAP environments and their dependencies on third-party applications can become enormous obstacles to effective problem resolution and mean time to resolution (MTTR), leading to repeated outages and multiple revenue losses.
Organizations must therefore reevaluate how they approach monitoring their SAP environments, strengthening their monitoring strategies to optimize application availability and performance, and observing the status of key business transactions live and in real time.
SAP monitoring challenges
The majority of organizations still deploy a multitude of tools to monitor dependent systems, or they have a siloed tool monitoring SAP, completely independent from the rest of their IT stack. A fragmented approach like this means they cannot see the full end-to-end flow and correlate business performance with their SAP landscape.
This requires many companies to continue to manually correlate SAP performance data with business events on an ad hoc basis or do so after business problems occur. They waste a lot of time trying to troubleshoot problems by having to manually review all the records, which adds to the MTTR, as dynamic environments create a wave of additional data, and this approach will not scale.
In fact, even if companies have the option to measure performance and monitor it in this way, it will only allow them to cope with problems. They cannot prioritize the most important business operations because they cannot establish which are the most direct customer and business-facing issues. Therefore, IT teams are exposed to just putting out fires, wasting valuable time and resources to focus on strategic priorities.
The importance of visibility in the IT environment
Without question, businesses need a single source of truth about their SAP environments and how they are driving company-wide performance.
The above means that it is necessary to ensure they have deep, end-to-end visibility to get a comprehensive view of their entire IT landscape. With this information, technologists are available to see and understand upstream service dependencies – as well as user experience – within SAP.
IT teams need a solution that can understand exclusive advanced business application programming code issues at a microscopic level so that developers can easily pinpoint the root cause of application performance issues. This level of visibility creates more stability within the application environment, enhancing technologists’ ability to respond reliably to IT, business outcomes, and customer expectations.
It is important for organizations to move on from piecemeal and heavily manual methods of monitoring SAP and non-SAP apps. Trying to recreate issues is not always possible. This approach is too time-consuming and increases the risk of ongoing performance problems that can affect end users and corrupt the bottom line.
Technologists can make use of dynamic baseline capabilities to bypass having to manually update static thresholds as priorities change and environments grow. To avoid infinite alert storms, enterprises could leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to proactively assess the status of transactions, as well as address issues that may arise.
Through this proactive functionality, organizations can adjust their resource investment based on scenarios specific to their business and potentially affecting performance, such as high traffic volumes due to holiday shopping or other seasonal events, month-end closing, and product launches, among other business activities.
This is especially relevant when organizations take advantage of cloud-native solutions. It provides real-time performance metrics, helping technologists report issues as they identify bottlenecks to focus on innovation processes that can drive organizational growth.
