Big Picture
Why do we need a central operation platform for cloud-centric landscapes?
With the SAP Intelligent Enterprise, traditional SAP landscapes are transforming:
- From a monolithic landscape to a multi-system and multi-service landscape
- Increased complexity to find and analyze issues on business process, integration, user, and application level
- Increased demand for end-to-end monitoring of business processes, integration, and users
Transparency is requested in the following areas:
- To find and analyze anomalies and exceptions during business process execution: Business Process Monitoring
- To correct message flows and integration related exceptions: Integration Monitoring
- To diagnose performance of user scenarios: Synthetic and Real User Monitoring
- To understand healthiness of applications, cloud services, and systems: Application Monitoring and Health Monitoring
As summarized in the table, there are different strategic operations platforms for different target groups.
| Strategic Operations Platform | Target Group |
|---|---|
| SAP Solution Manager |
|
| SAP Focused Run |
|
| SAP Cloud ALM |
|
Key Benefits
This figure provides a functional overview of SAP Cloud ALM for operations.
Use Cases
SAP Cloud ALM for operations enables customers to detect, analyze, and resolve problems based on full stack monitoring. In the figure, capabilities for future releases are indicated with an asterisk (*).
SAP Cloud ALM for operations detects operational issues in business process execution and reacts to it:
- Provides transparency on end-to-end business processes within a distributed and hybrid solution landscape
- Ensures smooth business operations without disruptions and increases the business process execution quality and performance
- Monitors the health of processes and detect anomalies during process execution, including drill down in business documents
- Alerts users directly on process disruptions and offers automated problem resolution via built-in operation flows
- Delivers pre-defined process content including auto-discovery of relevant metrics to be switched on
SAP Cloud ALM for operations ensures reliable data exchange between cloud services and on-premise systems:
- End-to-end monitoring by correlating single messages to end-to-end message flows across cloud services and systems
- Monitoring of integration-related exceptions
- Support of peer-to-peer interfaces as well as orchestrated integration
- Supports efficient problem resolution process and collaboration between business and IT as follows:
- Monitoring to visualize current integration status
- Alerting to notify responsible persons in business and IT about any integration-related problems discovered
- Search and track to identify business-driven problems
- Analytics to analyze identified critical issues
- Operation automation to trigger corrective actions
SAP Cloud ALM for operations allows customers to understand performance and utilization from the perspective of the end user:
- Real User and Performance Monitoring provides transparency regarding performance as experienced by end users as well as the utilization of business functionality
- Performance data is measured at the front end and server side to identify the root cause of performance problems (front end, network, cloud service, and/or on-premise system)
- Utilization of SAP Passport technology allows to correlate performance data measured at front end, cloud service, and/or system side
SAP Cloud ALM for operations provides transparency regarding the status of jobs and automated activities. Job and Automation Monitoring ensures business operations function without disruptions and increases the business process execution quality and performance as follows:
- Monitoring ensures efficient job and automated task execution:
- Monitoring job executions health and detecting anomalies during job execution
- Providing details at job execution level to enable fact-based root cause analysis
- Reducing the configuration effort by making use of historical execution information
- Alerting embedded in Job and Automation Monitoring enables notification of business and IT users on job/task-related disruptions and exceptions.
- Analytics embedded in Job and Automation Monitoring allow you to analyze root cause and trends based on historical data.
SAP Cloud ALM for operations enables customers to check application health of cloud services and systems as follows:
- Monitor technical metrics and events for cloud services and systems by:
- Executing application health checks for SAP built cloud services
- Delivering technical metrics and events for customer applications built on the SAP Business Technology Platform
- Providing metrics for lightweight system monitoring for SAP ABAP based systems
- Provide embedded alerting, including the capability to trigger notifications and corrective actions.
- Allow embedded analytics to analyze trends and root causes for discovered problems.
SAP Cloud ALM for operations enables customer to manage down times, SLAs, and events from a business perspective. In the figure, planned functionality is indicated with an asterisk (*).
SAP Cloud ALM for operations enables customers to process events from different sources in a unified and efficient way as follows:
- Unification of incoming events sent by internal or external senders (inbound unification)
- Efficient event processing based on unified event handling rules and forwarding to one or multiple receivers (outbound unification)
- Centralized configuration as well as embedded configuration of rules for event handling
- Foundation for intelligent correlation of events, for example, correlation of manually generated notifications with automatically generated alerts
SAP Cloud ALM for operations exposes IT-related information so it can be understood by business users:
- Business service as collection of cloud services and systems to represent certain business functionality
- Processing of maintenance, disruptions, degradation, and communication events provided by Cloud Availability Center or SAP Cloud ALM monitoring use cases
- Propagation of received events from cloud services and systems to business services
- Definition of customer events at business service and cloud service/ system level
From a Service Level Management perspective, SAP Cloud ALM for operations provides the following benefits:
- Calculation of unplanned down times for cloud services/systems
- Consolidation of availability information to business services
- Embedded service level reporting
- Definition of availability objectives at business service level
Onboarding and Usage
All information related to demo environments and onboarding can be found at the SAP Cloud ALM Home Page and SAP Help Portal.
All information related to the technical setup can be found at the SAP Cloud ALM for Operations Expert Portal.
All information related to application configuration and usage can be found in built-in SAP Web Assistant, SAP Cloud ALM for Operation Expert Portal, and SAP Help Portal.
Watch a video about Integration Monitoring.
Watch a video about Business Process Monitoring and Operations.
Links to Additional Information
