Welcome to this unit on SAP BTP observability strategy. Observability is one of the key qualities of any cloud technology. This unit will cover the observability strategy of SAP for the Business Technology Platform.
SAP is making every customer an intelligent, sustainable enterprise, and the SAP Business Technology Platform is the foundation of that journey. The SAP Business Technology Platform is used as a foundation within every line-of-business solution that SAP offers to make you an intelligent, sustainable enterprise. SAP BTP is also the platform that we offer to you as an innovation platform where you can create your own applications, integrations, analytical solutions infused with AI.
When you're using this platform as an innovation platform, you need to actually observe what's happening with the applications that you've built on the platform. This is where the SAP BTP observability strategy comes into play.
First we'll try to understand this platform from two perspectives. On one hand, when you look at the SAP Business Technology Platform, you see that there are certain applications that work more as software as a service, or SaaS, applications. For example, SAP Analytics Cloud, which is consumed by you to build analytic solutions on top of SAP.
On the other hand, we have a whole list of services that are constituted as platform as a service, or PaaS, which will give an open platform for you to build using our app development runtimes, for example, Cloud Foundry, or it could be any of the integrations that you build using our Integration Suite.
So, SAP BTP actually has two flavors to it in terms of offering you both SaaS services and platform services. When you think about observability, you need to see what kind of data your need so that you know what kind of data that you need to monitor and observe both for SaaS and PaaS.
For each of these usage scenarios, the kind of information that you need to identify the problems and find their root cause is different. That's the core of our strategy, along with seeing what kind of tools and capabilities that we can offer to you to help you detect the problems quickly and resolving the problems quickly in the SaaS and PaaS versions of SAP BTP.
Many of our customers are on the cloud journey. They have a variety of SAP cloud solutions, which are used by our customers to run their end-to-end business processes. They also have many on-prem solutions, making it a hybrid landscape. When it comes to the observability use cases for such a hybrid landscape, customers need tools for incident and problem management, for performance management, tools to look at the health of the systems and cloud services, and also, specifically for the platform use case, to look at the performance and health and exceptions that happen on the custom applications that they're building on the platform. To address this complex set of use cases, we need an approach to help customers to both detect and resolve the problems as quickly as possible.
Our vision is to harmonize the way we handle observability or telemetry data across the different platform services and applications. For the entire platform, whether you're consuming the runtimes on one end or SaaS applications on the other end, we want to harmonize the collection of all telemetry data, which is leveraged for detecting problems, as well as resolving the problems.
Once we collect and process this data, we want to provide you with the tools that you need to reduce the mean time to detect, as well as to reduce the mean time to resolve any problems that occur in the various SAP BTP Services and applications. We also have an Open API approach where we expose the raw telemetry data for consumption in third-party tools.
For Problem Detection, we want to provide a central single source of truth to easily detect problems. For Problem Resolution, we believe that there's a need for a decentral set of tools depending on the kind of problem we are trying to resolve. In the rest of the unit, we'll go a into a little bit of detail in terms of the capabilities that are currently on offer for detecting the problems, as well as for resolving the problems on SAP BTP.
For Problem Detection, the end goal is to reduce the time for you to detect the problems, which means that we need to provide the information as quickly as possible in a central monitoring tool. Whenever there's an anomaly on the platform, whether you are using the SaaS applications or PaaS applications, you should be able to detect the problems in various problem domains, like availability problems or performance problems or health of the instance itself, or with the integration of services and applications. To do this, we would like to collect the events, metrics, logs, and traces, and compose them into different problem areas, so that you can monitor the platform in a seamless way to be able to get alerted as quickly as possible for any kind of problem that occurs. The central monitoring tool of choice for SAP BTP is SAP Cloud ALM. An ALM tool built in the cloud supporting all SAP solutions also supports SAP BTP services and applications as well.
SAP Cloud ALM for operations is also an end-to-end operations platform that's available from SAP and included in your subscription. You can use the platform when you want to centralize your end-to-end operations across different SAP applications, whether it's SAP BTP, SAP S/4HANA, SAP SuccessFactors, or any other SAP solution that you use.
The tool processes various telemetry data points like events, alerts, log entries, metrics, and traces, and it categorizes into various problem domains, for example, health monitoring, integration monitoring, job monitoring, business process monitoring, and so on. It also has intelligent event processing so that you can easily deliver the relevant detection of problems into a central alert inbox, trigger an automation script, or trigger an external ticket in an incident management tool.
A key capability of SAP Cloud ALM that supports SAP BTP is integration monitoring.
This capability allows end-to-end monitoring by correlating single messages to end-to-end message flows across cloud services and systems and also Monitoring of integration-related exceptions.
It supports end-to-end message monitoring and correlates them across various applications. It supports monitoring of messages through SAP Mobile Services and Event Broker. It also supports monitoring of Business Objects in MDI and AIF messages in SAP MDG.
It's useful when you have a complex landscape where applications are talking to each other. It provides one single window where you'lll be able to track end-to-end the message flows from one system to another. You can then drill down for further analysis into the administration tools in the integration suite as well. So, integration monitoring for CPI is a great capability within SAP Cloud ALM.
The second capability that's relevant for SAP BTP is exception monitoring. This provides a central window into all exceptions happening across multiple services and applications in SAP BTP. Currently, SAP Cloud ALM supports exception monitoring of Integration Suite, SAP Analytics Cloud, and for custom applications built on SAP BTP runtimes, for example, Neo, Cloud Foundry, and ABAP environments.
Real User Monitoring in SAP Cloud ALM provides transparency regarding performance and errors as experienced by end users, as well as utilization of business functionality. It provides measurement at front end and server side to identify root causes of performance and functional problems, and it allows you to correlate monitoring data measured at front end, cloud service, and/or system side to end-to-end user request flows. In SAP BTP, you'll be able to do real-time performance monitoring of the usage of any custom extensions you've developed using any of the runtimes, for example, Neo, Cloud Foundry, and ABAP.
In the previous screenshot, you can see the user call trace of a Cloud Foundry based application from the front end to the services calls and all the way back to the database back end. This will help in easily identifying the bottle necks in real use performance issues.
Job and Automation Monitoring ensures efficient execution of jobs and tasks by monitoring execution status, application status, start delay and response time for jobs and tasks to enable root cause analysis. This functionality can now be used to monitoring the RPA bots created using SAP Build Process Automation and older iRPA capabilities of SAP BTP. It also allows you to monitor jobs scheduled by the custom applications developed using SAP BTP Cloud Foundry and ABAP environments as well.
Health monitoring in SAP Cloud ALM helps in monitoring of technical metrics and events for cloud services and systems by executing application health checks for SAP SaaS services and by delivering technical metrics and events for customer applications built at SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP PaaS Services). It also allows embedded analytics to analyze trends and root causes for discovered problems.
SAP Cloud ALM gives you a dashboard specific to the SAP BTP service/application instance. For example, there's a different set of KPIs that you monitor for HANA Cloud. There will be another set of KPIs that you'll use for monitoring your custom apps developed on SAP BTP Cloud Foundry applications, and so on. So, it gives you one window to monitor the health of various services of SAP BTP.
SAP Cloud ALM health monitoring currently supports various SAP BTP services like Integration Suite, HANA Cloud, Cloud Connector, SAP Build Process Automation, and the various runtimes like SAP BTP Neo, Cloud Foundry, and ABAP environments.
This concludes the Problem Detection tools for observability of SAP BTP.
Detecting problems is only one part of the story. What you need to do then is to actually figure out ways and means to quickly resolve problems. For each of the SAP BTP applications and services, the way you debug the issues or find the root cause could be different based on your platform use case.
To support this complexity, we want to centralize the problem detection with tools like SAP Cloud ALM. But once you detect a problem, there could be multiple places that you could go to actually resolve the problem depending upon the use case.
Certain problems could be resolved quickly using automation or workflows where even auto resolution can be built in. Other scenarios might require a deeper analysis of log or trace analysis, and you might want to correlate the logs that are coming from different services to be able to find the root-cause analysis of a particular problem.
And in specific cases, there are application-specific debugging tools that are needed to debug the situation as well. So, depending upon the use case and the complexity of the issue, you might have to jump into an export tool to debug the issue, or, if the issue is very simple, you would be able to automate the issue as well. Let's look at the various tools available to quickly resolve the issues.
One of the most efficient ways to resolve the problem is to automate the resolution of known issues. SAP BTP provides a choice of services to automate resolution workflows and bots. SAP Cloud ALM integrates with these services to have a seamless navigation between problem detection and these operation automation tools
It integrates with SAP Build Process Automation to automate problem resolution and operational procedures, which eventually require manual tasks across multiple organizational levels and, optionally, also automated tasks. You can also use bots with SAP Build Process Automation to automate your tasks.
It's important to note that these services are not included in SAP Cloud ALM. If the customer wants to use operation automation, they must have an additional subscription for them.
SAP Automation Pilot service is an SAP BTP service that helps administrators automate repeated problem resolutions and administrative tasks. It's a low-code/no-code automation engine that allows modeling and execution of a sequence of tasks in a serverless manner. It also allows reuse of scripts to build a sequence of tasks easily. It's typically used to automate operation tasks such as problem resolution of known issues, daily operations tasks, lifecycle management tasks, and scheduled maintenance.
Another key service that plays a significant role in problem resolution is SAP Cloud Logging. SAP Cloud Logging is a new logging service available in SAP BTP that enables application developers to ingest, store, and analyze application logs for any custom-built applications on SAP BTP.
It supports ingestion leveraging the Open Telemetry standard protocol. There are also various standard dashboards available with prebuilt content to easily analyze the logs.
This service helps in problem resolution of various types of problems in custom-built SAP BTP applications.
With the recent integration of SAP Cloud ALM as the central observability tool and SAP Cloud Logging service, we started to realize the strategy of integrated observability tool set. This means that the users can navigate from SAP Cloud ALM capabilities like exception monitoring, Health Monitoring and Real User Monitoring directly int directly into the SAP Cloud Logging dashboard with the context of the application in question seamlessly transferred between these tools. This will help to significantly improve the resolution time and lets the user focus on the relevant logs when navigating to the Cloud Logging Service.
You can also see this in action in the demo at the end of this unit.
As mentioned before, to resolve application-specific issues, we might need different kinds of administration/local expert tools. For example, if you would like to analyze performance issues in SAP Analytics Cloud, there's an expert tool in SAP Analytics Cloud, which leverages a predefined Performance Package to easily analyze problematic queries and data sources that are causing performance issues.
Similarly, we have administration capabilities in SAP Datasphere that allow users to debug DataSphere-specific operations issues.
Finally, SAP HANA Cloud offers SAP HANA Cockpit as an expert tool to debug issues related to SAP HANA Cloud. This also acts as a local debugging tool, complementing the central monitoring of SAP HANA Cloud in SAP Cloud ALM. Using the HANA Cockpit, you can analyze the database performance across the stack including memory, disk, and CPU usage.
The SAP BTP observability strategy provides an end-to-end observability tool set. For reducing mean time to detect issues, we provide a central observability platform in the form of SAP Cloud ALM, which provides various capabilities like health monitoring, integration monitoring, and exception monitoring for various SAP BTP services and applications. SAP Cloud ALM also provides an open API approach to get telemetry and monitoring data of SAP BTP, which can be used to integrate with third-party tools.
For reducing mean time to resolve the identified issues, we provide a set of services like SAP Automation Pilot for operations automation, SAP Cloud Logging for log ingestion and analysis, and other application-specific expert tools.
We'll now see a demo that showcases SAP Cloud ALM and its integration into the SAP Cloud Logging service.
In the next lesson, you'll learn more about SAP Cloud ALM and some of these local expert tools.