Describing Business Process Operations

Both the SAP Solution Manager system and SAP Cloud ALM provide comprehensive functions and tools for the regular operation of business processes (characterized by the Deploy, Operate, and Optimize phases in Application Lifecycle Management). These tools include the following:

• Monitoring Business Processes and Interfaces

• Delivery of SAP Services

• Gateway to the SAP Support infrastructure

Business Process Monitoring and Interface Monitoring (SAP Solution Manager) / Integration & Exception Monitoring (SAP Cloud ALM) enable you to identify and solve potential problems before critical situations occur. This helps you to avoid expensive downtimes of systems and business processes while minimizing the risk of data inconsistencies. Graphical illustrations give you an overview of entire business processes. You collect application-specific KPIs automatically.

Both SAP Cloud ALM and the SAP Solution Manager system also serve as gateway to Intelligent Delivery Group (formerly known as SAP Active Global Support) and the SAP Services and Support infrastructure. In turn, the Intelligent Delivery Group can collaborate with many other SAP organizations (such as Development and SAP Consulting) to give customers the right assistance at the right time. The Service Delivery enables you to use the different services from SAP for supporting your live operations. You can send a service request to SAP, create your own services locally and edit the requirements accordingly, or accept or reject a service suggested by SAP. The session details let you save your own context information for the sessions, assign service sessions directly to projects, and display documents, among other features.

Application Operations in the SAP Solution Manager system includes all the functions for the central monitoring, alerting, analysis, and administration of SAP solutions.

The components for application operations offer the following functions:

• System and application monitoring: You can monitor the status of complex landscapes and manage alerts with the end-to-end monitoring and alerting infrastructure. An example for system monitoring is shown in the figure below.

• Technical analytics and dashboards: Interactive, technical analysis functions enable you to run analytics for a wide range of aspects in multiple solutions. The dashboards for application operations give you a quick overview of the availability and performance of the systems you manage.

• Data volume management: You can monitor the data volume in your system landscape and reduce overall operating costs by reducing the size of your databases and the monthly data growth.

• Technical administration and guided procedures: Technical administration enables the efficient planning, implementation, execution, and analysis of your daily operating activities.

• Root cause analysis and exception management: You can analyze the root cause of a message and apply a top-down approach to develop solutions for distributed, multi-technology systems.

On a configured SAP Solution Manager System, enter SAP Solution Manager Launchpad (transaction SM_WORKCENTER) and switch to System and Application Monitoring area and then to application System Monitoring.

Real user monitoring in SAP Cloud ALM permanently measures all real user requests from your managed SAP solutions. The monitored services and systems send monitoring data to SAP Cloud ALM covering performance as well as utilization aspects. Also, real user monitoring offers drilldown possibilities from the global use of selected request types to single executions and execution details.

In detail, the data is correlated for the following different features:

• Identify single requests that show poor performance for a specific user.

• Review the execution frequency of a specific application or function.

• Access the request flow and view the analysis that includes all components involved in a request flow execution.

• Analyze the resource consumption of each subrequest. For example, review the time that was spent by a single subrequest for a component.

• Customize your request types with personalization features. Filter by specific user, user type, timeframe, request name, and request type.

• Display the values for different request metrics broken down into different dimensions for a large number of analysis options.

• Display the most important usage and performance metrics for frond-end and back-end request types.

• Display the request names using the most resources and causing the most critical execution results.

• Display detailed information about the actions of a user and the corresponding system response in chronological order.

• Display the operating system, the browser, and the device type used by the different users.

Real user monitoring is designed for application management service providers and customers who like to get transparency regarding real end user behavior based on high volumes of usage data.