Observing Your Apps Running on SAP BTP

You can use three main services to observe your SAP BTP applications:

1. SAP Cloud ALM serves for central (high-level) monitoring of BTP apps so that central support teams can detect problems as early as possible
2. SAP Cloud Logging serves for in-depth monitoring so that local DevOps teams can investigate the root-cause of problems
3. SAP Alert Notification service adds specific alert capture and propagation means, e.g., for app crash events.

The interaction between the respective observability services may proceed as follows: a crash of a Cloud Foundry application is detected by SAP Alert Notification, which then triggers an alert in SAP Cloud ALM. Within SAP Cloud ALM, a support engineer notices related exception log messages. To understand the details behind these, they navigate in a context-sensitive manner into SAP Cloud Logging to examine all detailed log messages collected within the context of the exception.

When providing and running applications in the cloud, Ops teams can encounter various issues and challenges within their cloud setup.

The following figure shows some examples of potential issues.

Handling such challenges in time is critical for the reliable operation of any cloud application.

Therefore, SAP BTP provides the DevOps teams with the proper tools and services to keep their solutions up and running. They need to be notified about potential issues in time to do this.

Moreover, to cope with issues outside of working hours, DevOps teams need to automate remediation and recommended actions that can fix the issues.

Our friends at Rotating Banana developed a cloud application deployed in SAP BTP, Cloud

Foundry environment. However, the app randomly becomes unstable and sometimes inaccessible for different users. To make matters more challenging, no alerts have been triggered so far. In this situation, a DevOps team should step in to tackle the problem.

As a member of the Ops team in charge of running this application, you are tasked to solve the issue by using local observability and operations tools in SAP BTP that complement SAP Cloud ALM as a central observability solution for SAP BTP:

1. SAP Alert Notification service (integrated with SAP Cloud ALM) with its primary focus on alerting
2. SAP Cloud Logging for an in-depth analysis of the root-cause
3. SAP Automation Pilot with its primary focus on ops automation

To implement notifications and automated remediation actions, you first need to understand the respective products and how they all work together in a fully integrated scenario. In the following sections, discover more details for both services before resuming the task in the Rotating Banana scenario.

As outlined before, the SAP Alert Notification service of SAP BTP collects crucial technical information from various sources and creates real-time events. The events are ingested into the service by SAP BTP applications and services, other products delivered by SAP, or by third-party tools and systems. Therefore, DevOps teams should regularly set conditions to filter out the relevant events, in interplay with SAP Cloud ALM, using the team's preferred channel of choice, or to trigger different predefined actions.

As an administrator, you must regularly check the well-being, usage, and sizing of your SAP Cloud Logging instances to benefit from the local observability capabilities of the SAP Cloud Logging service used in the observability activities outlined above. This ensures smooth but also cost-efficient operation.

The easiest overview to understand this can be gained via the service area of the respective instance. It gives immediate insight to:

• The number of data nodes and ingest instances
• The usage of available data storage
• The health status
• The number of active bindings

Use this information to adjust the sizing (auto-scaling) limits, reconsider the chosen service plans, or analyze health issues together with the DevOps team (note that improper/excessive usage by them could cause health issues).

You should now be able to explain how integrating SAP Alert Notification service and SAP Cloud Logging service with SAP Cloud ALM can enable (Dev)Ops teams to seamlessly and efficiently observe cloud applications running on SAP BTP.