Triggering Recommended Remediation Actions from SAP Cloud ALM

As you learned in the previous unit (Setting Up and Using SAP BTP Services for DevOps), the main goal of SAP Automation Pilot is to simplify and automate complex manual technical processes and flows. This enables DevOps teams to run their solutions on SAP BTP with minimal operational effort.

To provide more options to DevOps teams, automations in SAP Automation Pilot can be triggered in various ways to best suit your operational needs - manually by the DevOps team, through the built-in scheduler, automatically via integration with services and ops platforms like SAP Cloud ALM, or by other applications and systems (see the diagram below for a better understanding).

SAP Automation Pilot integration into SAP Cloud ALM brings a new level of intelligence and efficiency to cloud operations. This seamless connection empowers customers to automate operational tasks and proactively manage their IT landscapes with minimal manual intervention.

To better understand the integration flow, analyze the overview of the solution setup in the diagram below:

As outlined in the lesson "Explaining why to integrate DevOps services into SAP's Strategic Operations Platforms", integrating technical automation of operational tasks with central strategic operations platforms can increase the efficiency of your operations approach. For SAP BTP, this is offered by integrating SAP Automation Pilot into SAP Cloud ALM, which brings the following benefits:

• Integrated monitoring and issue resolution, where SAP Cloud ALM continuously monitors your entire IT landscape (providing actionable insights and early warnings). Detected issues can be addressed faster and more efficiently with the integration of SAP Automation Pilot, ensuring minimal disruption.
• Automated operations task execution: operational remediation tasks can now be triggered directly from SAP Cloud ALM — either automatically based on events or manually by operators — enabling real-time, consistent, and reliable responses to incidents and system events.
• Extendable operations workflows: users can design and customize their own operational flows using SAP Automation Pilot to streamline processes according to specific business and IT needs.

For detailed guidance on how to configure this integration, please refer to the official documentation: Configure the Integration with SAP Automation Pilot.

Returning to Rotating Banana, remember that you are tasked with implementing an integrated monitoring and automated incident response system for your cloud app deployed in SAP BTP. Mind that the solution architecture has the following details:

• The cloud application runs on SAP BTP, Cloud Foundry runtime, so there are Cloud Foundry audit events collected automatically in the platform itself.
• In case the cloud application crashes unexpectedly, related events are collected automatically by the SAP Alert Notification service for SAP BTP.
• The integration between SAP Alert Notification service for SAP BTP and SAP Cloud ALM ensures that the app crash event gets automatically ingested into SAP Cloud ALM for central problem detection.
• SAP Cloud ALM fires an alert to the DevOps team. At the same time, for new issues, SAP Cloud ALM would allow context-sensitive navigation to local observability tools like SAP Cloud Logging service, for problem resolution. Also, it could automatically trigger a command in SAP Automation Pilot.
• SAP Automation Pilot executes an ops automation flow (triggered by SAP Cloud ALM) that:
  • collects the recent application logs and audit events related to the crash event,
  • stores these logs into a ticket in a ticket management system and assigns the ticket to a DevOps team member.

The workflow is illustrated in the following diagram.

To implement the desired solution, complete the following steps (use the links to explore the actions in detail):

1. Integrate SAP Alert Notification service for SAP BTP with SAP Cloud ALMand activate the switch in SAP Cloud ALM for "SAP BTP: Application Crash".
2. Integrate SAP Automation Pilot with SAP Cloud ALM.
3. Configure SAP Alert Notification service for SAP BTP to start collecting the application audit events for Cloud Foundry.
4. Create an automation flow in SAP Automation Pilot to enable an automated response to the potential app crash. Execute the following steps:
   • Use content from the provided catalogsto get the latest app state and the most recent 20 events kept for your Cloud Foundry application. Consider using the commands "GetCfAppState" and "GetCfAppEvents";
   • Model a custom command to fetch the last 100 lines from the application’s log file;
   • Create a ticket in a ticket management system that stores the collected app insights. This will enable quick access to troubleshooting details that may explain the crash. To implement such a command for Jira (used as an example for a ticket management system in our use case), explore the commands in the "Jira Catalog".
5. Configure the "app crash" event in SAP Cloud ALM Health Monitoringand enable the following actions:
   • Send an email notification - an email alert is sent to the DevOps team, ensuring immediate awareness of the issue.
   • Trigger the automation flow in SAP Automation Pilot created in the previous step.

By following the steps outlined above, you have implemented a comprehensive, end-to-end solution for automated incident response in your cloud application on SAP BTP. This solution not only detects and alerts you about issues but also automatically triggers recommended actions for troubleshooting and incident management. By structuring and automating the incident response process without the need for human intervention, you ensure faster problem resolution, more efficient project delivery, and higher client satisfaction.

You have developed a foundational understanding of the monitoring and automated remediation features offered by local observability and operations tools in SAP BTP, such as SAP Alert Notification service for SAP BTP, SAP Automation Pilot and SAP Cloud Logging, alongside central observability tools like SAP Cloud ALM.

Additionally, you have learned how to implement a basic monitoring mechanism and automated incident responses for cloud applications using SAP tools that support your DevOps tasks, all without requiring coding expertise.

You should now be able to:

• Master the process of implementing automated monitoring and alerting for your cloud application in SAP BTP;
• Integrate SAP Automation Pilot into SAP Cloud ALM;
• Build an ops automation flow in SAP Automation Pilot which can be triggered by SAP Cloud ALM as a recommended action for your cloud application in SAP BTP.

A detailed step-by-step implementation guide is available on GitHub if you want to learn more about this example or implement it in your landscape.