Explaining Central Observability Tools

SAP Cloud ALM is an SAP SaaS (Software as a Service) product, this means that SAP takes care of the respective service. All customers who have an SAP cloud subscription or an SAP Enterprise Support contract are entitled to use SAP Cloud ALM.

• SAP Cloud ALM empowers customers to understand the health of their cloud-centric and hybrid SAP solution landscapes:
  • It provides full stack monitoring covering processes, integrations, users, jobs & tasks, and the health of services and systems.
  • It delivers embedded alerting for problem resolution as well as embedded analytics for root cause analysis.
  • It acts as collaboration platform between the Lines of Business (LoB) and Information Technology (IT).
• SAP Cloud ALM introduces Intelligent Event Processing as central routing infrastructure to enable event correlation and intelligent alerting.
• SAP Cloud ALM integrates analytics and intelligence functionality context sensitively.
• SAP Cloud ALM enables operations automation by integrating several automation engines.
• SAP Cloud ALM provides transparency regarding the health of business processes including event calendar and service level management.

On a more architectural level, SAP Cloud ALM consumes different types of raw data at the inbound side. This could be metrics, configuration items, log entries, as well as all the events and alerts from other infrastructures. SAP Cloud ALM for Operations assigns this raw data to different monitoring use cases.

Watch this video to get a functional overview about SAP Cloud ALM for Operations:

The following figure gives you a schematic representation of the SAP Cloud ALM for Operation:

The monitoring stack of SAP Cloud ALM for Operations consists of the following tools:

• Business Process Monitoring, which is intended for business users, and which contains only business process KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) (and no technical KPI visible in Business Process Monitoring).
• Integration & Exception Monitoring, which is addressing the needs of integration personas. All types of integration, whether it's peer to peer or orchestrated integration is covered by Integration & Exception Monitoring.
• Synthetic User Monitoring and Real User Monitoring for those who are dealing with end user experiences, or end user performance.
• Job & Automation Monitoring for background processing, where certain business process steps are executed automatically.

• The Configuration & Security Analysis application for those who are responsible to ensure compliance in the configuration - and specifically from security perspective .

• Health Monitoring for the remaining technical aspects for the technical metrics.

With these tools, SAP Cloud ALM provides complete coverage for SAP Solution Landscapes and all this different raw data is assigned to the right use case.

SAP Cloud ALM for Operations unifies this in it's central event management, which we call Intelligent Event Processing. This means that all these use cases are constantly calculating events.

These events can then lead to certain activities: From an event, SAP Cloud ALM for Operations can:

• Alert and Notification Management: generate an alert or notification
• Operations Automation: trigger an operation flow
• External API Management: call an Application Programming Interface (API)

At the outbound side, this can lead to different other activities. For example – via API call – SAP Cloud ALM for Operations can generate a ticket in a ticket system or can generate a task in a task management tool of your choice. Similarly, SAP Cloud ALM can create chat messages, trigger operations flows in SAP Build Process Automation or SAP Automation Pilot. In addition, this data is exposed both to third-party analytics tools (in the raw data format) and for the monitoring capabilities of SAP Cloud ALM.

SAP Cloud ALM for Operations offers built in Analytics & Intelligence specifically for the different use cases providing dashboards and analytics, which are specific for the appropriate monitoring persona.

On top of this, there is Business Service Management, which is summarizing the different technical information to different signals that are produced with the help of the infrastructure of SAP Cloud ALM to easily understandable status information. To achieve this, we collect several services and systems together to business services and Business Service Management consolidates all this to one status information. This information can come directly from SAP via the cloud availability in SAP for Me or it is calculated within the SAP Cloud ALM infrastructure. This status information can be enriched with manually created customer specific information and can then be shown in the Event Calendar. Based on this, we can also define service levels and then also measure whether and to which degree these service levels are met within the Service Level Management function.

In addition you can distinguish between product-specific and product agnositic features:

Product-specific

Product-specific means the capability provides out-of-the-box content tailored to particular SAP products.

This is common in Operations apps such as Health Monitoring, Integration & Exception Monitoring, Job Monitoring, and Business Process Monitoring. These apps deliver preconfigured adapters, KPIs, events, and dashboards for SAP solutions like SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP SuccessFactors, and SAP Ariba.

They also remain open via APIs and connectors, enabling you to ingest metrics and events from non-SAP systems, monitor external integrations, and include custom applications alongside your SAP landscape.

Also, the cross-functional capability Operations Automation is product-specific.

Product-agnostic

Product-agnostic means the capability is generic and not tied to any specific SAP product.This is typical of Implementation apps—Requirements, Tasks, Test Management, and Deployment—which behave the same across products and can also manage non-SAP work items or projects. You can integrate external tools (e.g., Jira) and track custom development outside SAP. In Operations, the only product-agnostic app is Synthetic User Monitoring; the cross-functional capabilities Alert Management, Notification Management, and External API Management are also product-agnostic.

The next graphic shows how Business Process Monitoring detect operational issues in business process execution:

Business Process Monitoring:

• Provides transparency on end-to-end business processes within a distributed solution landscape.
• Ensures business continuity to increase business process execution quality and performance.
• Monitors processes' health and detect anomalies during process execution including drill down into business documents.
• Alerts users directly on process disruptions including automated problem resolution.
• Delivers pre-defined process content including auto-discovery of relevant business process KPI's to be switched on.

This figure shows the data exchange between services and systems and the Integration & Exception Monitoring:

Integration & Exception Monitoring provides an end-to-end monitoring by correlating single messages to end-to-end message flows across cloud services and systems. It enables monitoring of integration related exceptions and provides the following advantages:

• Unified approach for peer-to-peer interfaces as well as orchestrated integration
• Efficient problem resolution support with enabling of collaboration between business and IT
• One-stop application with integrated monitoring, alerting, analysis, and search-and-track functionality

The following image shows the data collection of Real User Monitoring to understand performance and utilization from the end user perspective:

Real User Monitoring:

• Provides transparency regarding performance and errors experienced by end users as well as utilization of business functionality.
• Offers measurement at front-end and server side to identify actual root cause of performance and functional problems.
• Allows to correlate monitoring data measured at front-end, cloud service and/or system side with end-to-end user request flows.

The following graphic illustrate how to monitor performance and availability of web applications from an user perspective using selenium-based scripts within Synthetic User Monitoring:

Synthetic User Monitoring:

• Enables monitoring based on custom Selenium-based scripts, and therefore supports most of the web applications.
• Is based on regularly executed scripts on Selenium-based remote webdriver infrastructures.
• Provides proactive problem detection: 24x7 monitoring enables detection of performance and availability issues before end users are impacted.
• Runs independently, based on real user activities.
• Allows comparable measurements as the monitoring relies on identical user scenarios regularly executed.
• Makes it possible to monitor the evolution of the performance and availability based on comparable metrics.

The next slide shows how Job & Automation Monitoring aims to provide transparency regarding job executions and automated activities:

Job & Automation Monitoring ensures efficient execution of jobs and tasks:

• By monitoring execution status, application status, start delay and response time for jobs and tasks.
• By providing details of job on task execution level to enable root cause analysis.
• By reducing configuration efforts when using historical execution information.

Embedded Alerting enables notification of business and IT users on job & task related disruptions and exceptions.

Embedded Analytics allows to analyze root causes and trends based on historical data.

This picture shows the collection of configuration items from services and systems within Configuration & Security Analysis:

Configuration & Security Analysis:

• Enables a regular collection of configuration items and software levels into the configuration stores of the Configuration and Change Database (CCDB).
• Provides a store browser as user interface to visualize content of configuration stores.
• Allows a change analysis for selected scope and timeframe.
• Includes a search capability for pattern-based browsing into configuration items of selected scope.

Additional planned functionality includes configuration validation to compare the TO-BE with the AS-IS situation, embedded alerting to notify on critical issues, and embedded analytics to analyze trends and root causes for discovered problems.

The following infographic gives an overview of Health Monitoring:

Health Monitoring enables the monitoring of technical metrics and events for cloud services and systems by:

• Executing application health checks for SAP SaaS services.
• Delivering technical metrics and events for customer applications built at SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP PaaS Services).
• Providing metrics for light-weight system monitoring for SAP ABAP based systems.

It provides embedded alerting including the capability to trigger notifications and corrective actions and allows embedded analytics to analyze trends and root causes for discovered problems.

The following graphic shows process events from different sources and lists options for follow-up activities possible with Intelligent Event Processing:

Intelligent Event Processing, including Alert Management and Notification Management:

• Represents the central intelligence for efficient event routing between internal and external producers and consumers.
• Enables unified event processing based on rules for automatically as well as manually triggered events.
• Includes centralized event handling via event log viewer as well as alert handling via use case specific alert inbox.
• Is the foundation for intelligent correlation of events, for example, correlation of manually generated notifications with automatically generated alerts.

SAP Cloud ALM for Operations provides a set of public APIs that allow you to integrate it with external systems in both directions. You can push data into SAP Cloud ALM, pull data out of it, route operational events to ticketing systems, and extract analytics for external reporting.

The next slide organizes the APIs into three main integration patterns: Inbound Integration, Outbound Integration, and Problem Routing. Two additional APIs — the Status Events API for Business Service Management and the Analytics API for Analytics & Intelligence — complete the picture:

Inbound Integration

Inbound APIs allow external systems and agents to push raw operational data into SAP Cloud ALM. This is particularly relevant when you have monitoring agents, custom applications, or third-party tools that generate data you want SAP Cloud ALM to process and display.

• Raw Data Inbound Metrics API: Used for Health Monitoring. This API allows external agents or custom scripts to send metric data — such as performance indicators or resource consumption values — directly into the Health Monitoring use case. This is useful when you have systems that are not natively supported by SAP Cloud ALM's data collection, but it still needs to be included in your health overview.
• Raw Data Inbound Logs API: Used for Integration & Exception Monitoring. This API enables external systems to ingest log data into SAP Cloud ALM's Integration & Exception Monitoring. Rather than relying solely on SAP-native log collection, you can route logs from custom integration scenarios or middleware through this API.
• Raw Data Inbound Traces API: Used for Integration & Exception Monitoring, Real User Monitoring, and Synthetic User Monitoring. Trace data — which captures the path of a request or transaction through a system — can be pushed into SAP Cloud ALM via this API. This is particularly relevant in distributed architectures where end-to-end tracing spans over multiple systems.

Outbound Integration

Outbound APIs allow to export raw operational data from SAP Cloud ALM to external systems. This is useful when you want to forward data to a centralized observability platform.

• Raw Data Outbound Metrics API: Used for Health Monitoring. Metrics collected by SAP Cloud ALM's Health Monitoring can be exported to external systems for further processing, storage, or visualization.
• Raw Data Outbound Logs API: Used for Integration & Exception Monitoring. Log data collected within Integration & Exception Monitoring can be forwarded to an external log management systems.
• Raw Data Outbound Traces API: Used for Integration & Exception Monitoring and Real User Monitoring. Trace data collected in these two use cases can be exported outbound for consumption by external tracing or observability tools.

Problem Routing

The Problem Routing group of APIs connects SAP Cloud ALM's event processing and automation capabilities with external IT service management systems. This is where SAP Cloud ALM stops being a passive monitoring tool and becomes an active participant in your incident management processes.

• Event Situations API: Used for Intelligent Event Processing. This API allows external systems to send event situations — structured representations of operational conditions — into SAP Cloud ALM's Intelligent Event Processing engine. This enables SAP Cloud ALM to evaluate and react to events originating outside its own monitoring scope.
• ITSM API: Used for Intelligent Event Processing and Operations Automation. The IT Service Management API is your integration point with external ticketing systems such as ServiceNow or other ITSM platforms. When SAP Cloud ALM detects a critical situation, the ITSM API can be used to automatically create or update incidents in your service management tool.
• Resource Changes API: Used for Intelligent Event Processing and Operations Automation. When infrastructure or resource changes occur in your landscape — such as a system going offline, a configuration change, or a deployment event — external systems can report these changes to SAP Cloud ALM via this API. The information feeds directly into Intelligent Event Processing and Operations Automation, enabling automated responses.

Business Service Management

Status Events API: Used for Business Service Management. This API allows external systems to report status changes for services or components that are tracked within SAP Cloud ALM's Business Service Management. If a business-critical service changes its availability status in an external system, that change can be reflected in SAP Cloud ALM's service management view in near real time.

Analytics & Intelligence

Analytics API: This is the most broadly applicable API in SAP Cloud ALM for Operations. It covers virtually every monitoring use case: Business Process Monitoring, Business Service Management, Configuration & Security Analysis, Health Monitoring, Integration & Exception Monitoring, Issues and Actions Management, Job & Automation Monitoring, Real User Monitoring, and Synthetic User Monitoring.

The Analytics API is your primary interface for extracting monitoring results, KPIs, and operational insights from SAP Cloud ALM into external reporting tools, dashboards, or data platforms. If you want to build a unified operations dashboard that combines SAP Cloud ALM data with data from other sources. This is the API you will use most frequently.

Business Service Management allows to create and modify business services by assigning services and systems. This allows to abstract from the technical landscape details, which are typically unknown to the business users. In addition, Business Service Management enables to display and process service status events (disruption, degradation, maintenance, communication), which are communicated by SAP for Me.

The following graphic illustrating the management of Business Services, Service Level Management, and the Event Calendar within Business Service Management:

It also includes Service Level Management with the following possibilities:

• Definition of service level objectives at business service level.
• Automatic and continuous calculation of service level and consolidation to business services level.
• Embedded service level reporting including drill down.

Finally, it includes an Event Calendar with the following possibilities:

• Business service as collection of services and systems.
• Import of SAP initiated status (maintenance, disruptions, degradation, communication events) including outbound API.
• Maintenance and execution of customer initiated status.
• Forwarding of status events from Business Service Management towards monitoring use cases.
• Calculation of status events by monitoring use cases and forwarding to Business Service Management (planned).

SAP Cloud ALM for Operations does not just collect monitoring data, it gives you multiple ways to analyze, visualize, and act on it. This slide introduces the full analytic feature set, structured around three areas: Embedded Analytics, External Analytics, and Monitoring Dashboards, with a fourth emerging capability through the Joule Dashboard Generation Agent:

Embedded Analytics

Embedded Analytics is the built-in analytics layer that ships with every monitoring use case in SAP Cloud ALM for Operations. You do not need to configure anything extra - it is available by default across all seven core monitoring use cases:

• Business Process Monitoring
• Integration & Exception Monitoring
• Real User Monitoring
• Synthetic User Monitoring
• Job & Automation Monitoring
• Configuration & Security Analysis
• Health Monitoring

Each use case includes dashboards and analytical views purpose-built for that specific scenario. For example, trend analysis in Health Monitoring or root-cause drill-down in Integration & Exception Monitoring. The key message here is that embedded analytics is contextual: the right data is presented within the right monitoring app, without requiring users to switch tools or export data.

External Analytics

While embedded analytics covers the built-in layer, External Analytics allows you to take SAP Cloud ALM data further by connecting to specialized analytics platforms:

• SAP Analytics Cloud: for enterprise-grade reporting, planning, and storytelling on top of SAP Cloud ALM data
• Grafana: for observability-style dashboards, particularly popular in technical operations teams

In principle, any tool that can consume the Analytics API or the Raw Data Outbound APIs (OpenTelemetry) can be connected.

External Analytics is the right choice when you need to combine data from several use cases, SAP Cloud ALM data with data from other sources, or when our organization already has an established analytics or observability platform. Please check SAP Note 3674842 - Access SAP Cloud ALM analytics from SAP Analytics Cloud for more information.

Monitoring Dashboards

The Monitoring Dashboards app gives operations teams a unified, personalized view:

Predefined Dashboard Pages

SAP delivers three ready-to-use dashboard pages out of the box:

• Chart Examples: a showcase page that demonstrates all available chart types — useful for understanding what visualization options exist
• Operational Status: consolidates app status, job status, and integration status into a single view
• Services Status: shows the current operational status, drawing data from Health Monitoring, Real User Monitoring, and Integration & Exception Monitoring

Hint

Predefined dashboard pages cannot be edited directly. If you want to customize one, you must first duplicate it and then modify the copy.

Personalized Dashboards

Beyond the predefined pages, users can build their own dashboards. The key capabilities are:

• Build custom dashboards by selecting cards from a predefined library
• Combine analytics from across all Operations apps into a single unified view
• Choose from a variety of chart types to match the data and the audience

Personalized dashboards are the right tool when a team wants a tailored operations overview - for example, a dashboard focused exclusively on integration health, or one that combines business process and job monitoring.

Joule Dashboard Generation Agent

The newest addition to this picture is the Joule Dashboard Generation Agent. If your organization has activated the SAP Business AI feature ALM Dashboard Generation Agent, users can configure dashboards using AI assistance - describing what they want in natural language and letting Joule build the dashboard structure.

This is an emerging capability and represents SAP's direction toward AI-driven operations tooling. It reduces the manual effort required to configure dashboards, particularly for users less familiar with the available card library.

Note

Joule Agents are part of SAP Business AI Premium and operate on a consumption-based model. Each agent action draws from a pool of AI Units, which must be purchased separately. For details on packages and pricing, refer to SAP AI plans and pricing and the SAP Discovery Center Business AI Features (Product Filter: SAP Cloud ALM) page.

The next slide marks a shift from pure analytics into intelligence. While the previous topic covered how data is visualized and analyzed, this topic focuses on how SAP Cloud ALM actively assists users - recommending actions, detecting anomalies, answering questions, and increasingly taking autonomous steps. The intelligence layer is structured around three distinct levels of maturity: Classic AI Features, Joule as a Conversational UI, and Joule Agents:

Classic AI Features

Classic AI Features are the established, use-case-specific AI capabilities that have been part of SAP Cloud ALM for Operations for some time. They are embedded directly within individual monitoring use cases and operate without user interaction. They run in the background, analyzing data and automatically surfacing recommendations or detections.

• Business Process Monitoring — Threshold Recommendations: instead of manually defining alert thresholds for KPIs, SAP Cloud ALM can analyze historical data and recommend appropriate threshold values. This reduces configuration effort and improves alert quality.
• Integration & Exception Monitoring — Solving Tips for Detected Exceptions: when an exception is detected, the system can suggest resolution steps based on the type of error. This accelerates problem resolution, particularly for less experienced team members.
• Real User Monitoring — Change Point Detection: the system automatically identifies moments where user performance patterns change significantly — for example, a sudden increase in response times — and flags these as change points. This enables proactive investigation before users raise complaints.
• Synthetic User Monitoring, Health Monitoring — Dynamic Thresholds: rather than using fixed thresholds, Dynamic Thresholds adapt automatically based on observed patterns. This reduces false positives from normal fluctuations while still catching genuine anomalies.

Joule - Conversational User Interface

Joule represents a fundamentally different interaction model. Rather than navigating menus and configuring screens, users can simply describe what they need in plain language - and Joule responds. In the context of SAP Cloud ALM for Operations, Joule provides:

• Natural language interaction: ask questions and trigger actions without navigating complex menu structures
• Faster navigation: describe what you are looking for, and Joule takes you directly to the right app or feature
• Quicker onboarding: new and occasional users can become productive faster by asking rather than searching
• Built-in SAP Cloud ALM knowledge: get answers about features, processes, and configurations without leaving the application
• Foundation for future agentic capabilities: the conversational interface is not just a convenience feature — it is the foundation on which agentic AI will be built

Hint

Joule Conversational UI (included with Joule Base). The Joule conversational interface for SAP Cloud ALM is included with Joule Base at no additional cost. A Joule Base subscription or an existing AI Units entitlement is required to activate it

Joule Agents - Agentic AI

Joule Agents represent the most forward-looking part of this picture. Where Joule as a conversational UI responds to user requests, Joule Agents act autonomously - they can be triggered by events, execute multi-step tasks, and make decisions within defined boundaries, without requiring the user to drive every step.

• ALM Dashboard Generation: when the SAP Business AI feature ALM Dashboard Generation Agent is activated, Joule can build and display graphical dashboard cards based on SAP Cloud ALM data autonomously — the user describes the desired outcome, and the agent constructs the dashboard. This was covered in the previous slide on Monitoring Dashboards.
• ALM Alert Resolution: this agent can analyze alerts, identify probable root causes, and suggest — or in future scenarios execute — remediation steps. This directly targets one of the most time-consuming activities in operations: the initial triage and investigation of alerts.

Agentic AI capabilities in SAP Cloud ALM are actively being expanded. The two examples shown represent the current state, but the direction is clearly toward broader autonomous operations support.

Note

Joule Agents are part of SAP Business AI Premium and operate on a consumption-based model. Each agent action draws from a pool of AI Units, which must be purchased separately. For details on packages and pricing, refer to SAP AI plans and pricing and the SAP Discovery Center Business AI Features (Product Filter: SAP Cloud ALM) page.

Together, these capabilities represent SAP's vision for an AI-assisted and eventually autonomous operations platform.