Integrating DevOps Services into SAP's Strategic Operations Platforms

Objectives

After completing this lesson, you will be able to:
  • Describe why it makes sense to integrate local services into central operations platforms and tools
  • Name and describe the strategic operations platforms from SAP
  • Name and describe options to integrate DevOps services from SAP BTP into these strategic operations platforms

Motivation

Note

This lesson is geared mainly towards administrators, but any roles involved could benefit from it.

SAP offers several strategic operations platforms. Many customers have invested in corresponding processes on these platforms, so it's essential that the SAP BTP tools and cloud services that drive DevOps can smoothly integrate there so that you can stick to existing, known processes. This investment allows you to handle hybrid solutions that span beyond SAP BTP.

In this lesson, you will learn more about the existing integration options for SAP BTP cloud services related to DevOps.

Motivation

To be able to operate end-to-end business solutions smoothly, it's essential that you can holistically handle all building blocks that form this solution, no matter in which environment they run. Think of an application running on SAP BTP that accesses data points from your on-premise or private-cloud back-end and maybe additional SAP Cloud systems. Although SAP BTP does contribute an important part, it's just one building block of the complete solution.

To operate such an end-to-end business solution, it's critical to handle interdependencies across the involved environments and to get a holistic picture of the complete solution in one place, comprising all its building blocks, not only single parts.

This handling is what central operations platforms offer, along with many other features. Get more insights in the following video:

Strategic Operations Platforms from SAP

SAP offers the following two strategic operations platforms for Application Lifecycle Management (ALM). These platforms ensure accelerated implementation and smooth operations of your end-to-end business solutions throughout their lifecycle.

SAP Cloud ALM is a cloud-based Application Lifecycle Management solution for cloud and hybrid customers. On-premise-only landscapes are supported as well. SAP Cloud ALM provides standardized ALM processes for implementation, operations, and consumption of SAP supported services.

SAP Focused Run is an on-premise solution for service providers and customers with advanced operations needs. SAP Focused Run provides high-volume system and application monitoring, alerting, and analytics.

In addition, there is SAP Solution Manager, an on-premise ALM solution for customers with on-premise and hybrid SAP solutions. Customers can select the ALM functions they require and configure them individually. SAP Solution Manager follows the maintenance strategy of the SAP Business Suite. As a result, SAP Cloud ALM is the go-to platform for all SAP Solution Manager customers (and all new customers).

Integration of DevOps Services into SAP's Strategic Operations Platforms

You can also use several parallel platforms to handle different use cases and solutions with various boundary conditions.

Business Scenario

Although Rotating Banana plans to stick to specific established processes on SAP Solution Manager for the time being, gaining experience with first scenarios on SAP Cloud ALM is crucial to preparing their planned step-wise transition towards it as part of the company's cloud transformation.

Integrating SAP BTP Transport into Central Change and Deployment Management

You integrate Transport Management processes into strategic operations platforms from SAP to benefit from Change Management capabilities for your delivery approach.

This allows you to orchestrate the deployments performed by transport management from overarching central change and deployment management capabilities, similar to what you might already do in other SAP environments.

Also, this enables you to synchronize SAP BTP changes with changes performed in other environments, for overarching business solutions, and handle interdependencies between the single changes.

For example, to integrate SAP Cloud Transport Management into change and deployment management capabilities from SAP Cloud ALM, follow these instructions:

SAP Cloud Transport Management Service | SAP Help Portal

Note

SAP recommends that you use one or more standalone instances of SAP Cloud Transport Management service, running in your global account. This has several advantages compared to a setup using the SAP Cloud Transport Management instance running on the SAP Cloud ALM global account. For example, you can connect several instances of SAP Cloud Transport Management to your SAP Cloud ALM and also handle the transport of content from SAP Analytics Cloud (which cannot be handled by SAP Cloud Transport Management instances running on your SAP Cloud ALM account). For more information, see this blog post [link to: blog post.

New feature in SAP Cloud Transport Management: Virtual Transport Nodes

In many hybrid scenarios the number of systems / subaccounts / tenants is different in the on-premise and in the SAP BTP world (for example, if there's no pre-production subaccount in SAP BTP). This can lead to unwanted behavior of the strategic operations platforms when transporting content. Therefore, SAP Cloud Transport Management has recently introduced the option to create virtual transport nodes (that is, nodes without a target subaccount). With that it is possible to cater for ‘uneven’ landscapes.

For more information see About Transport Nodes | SAP Help Portal

Business Scenario

Rotating Banana is an extensive user of Change Request Management (ChaRM) of SAP Solution Manager. Also, it's planned to come up with hybrid solutions, running not only on SAP BTP, but also leveraging data points on SAP S/4HANA and extending SAP SuccessFactors. Therefore, for the time being, you decide to expand the usage of ChaRM to SAP BTP for hybrid solutions.

In parallel, for cloud-native applications running on SAP BTP where not the full scope of ChaRM is required, you decide to use SAP Cloud ALM's change and deployment management capabilities to gain first experience and prepare the step-wise transition of SAP operations processes towards this strategic platform.

If you should use third-party operations platforms, SAP Cloud Transport Management does offer open APIs that allow you to orchestrate SAP BTP transports from external tools.

Integrating Alerting and Technical Ops Automation Into Central Operations Processes

You can integrate alerts and events from SAP BTP into central health monitoring capabilities. This allows you to get transparency on end-to-end business solutions.

For example, to integrate the SAP Alert Notification service of SAP BTP into SAP Cloud ALM, set up the service and follow these instructions: SAP Cloud ALM - Health Monitoring for SAP BTP Cloud Foundry

To centrally trigger operations flows on the business solution parts running on SAP BTP, integrate the SAP Automation Pilot service into SAP Cloud ALM as follows: SAP Cloud ALM - Configure the Integration with SAP Automation Pilot.

To enable context-sensitive navigation from central observability capabilities, such as Exception Monitoring or Real User Monitoring in SAP Cloud ALM to SAP Cloud Logging for log file analysis, see the SAP Cloud ALM for Operations Expert Portal.

If you should use third-party operations platforms, SAP Alert Notification service and SAP Automation Pilot offer open APIs that allow you to receive alerts from SAP BTP and trigger automated operations tasks on SAP BTP from these third-party tools.

Business Scenario

As an administrator at Rotating Banana, you use the SAP Alert Notification service to forward events from SAP BTP to SAP Solution Manager for your hybrid solutions. This way, you get full transparency about the health status of your end-to-end business solutions in one central place – whether, if they run on SAP S/4HANA, SAP SuccessFactors or SAP BTP.

For cloud-native applications, SAP BTP events get forwarded into health monitoring capabilities for SAP Cloud ALM.

To ease troubleshooting of your cloud applications via context-sensitive naviation to log file analysis, you integrate SAP Cloud Logging service into SAP Cloud ALM.

To reduce manual efforts, you integrate the SAP Automation Pilot service into SAP Cloud ALM to centrally trigger automatic alert remediation actions for your cloud-native applications on SAP BTP.

Summary

You can now name the benefits of integrating local operations tools into central operations platforms – such as for orchestrating transports from central change and deployment management capabilities, centrally receiving alerts of SAP BTP parts of an overarching hybrid business solution, and centrally triggering the execution of technical operations tasks also on SAP BTP.

You can also name SAP's strategic operations platforms and describe options for integrating DevOps services from SAP BTP into them.

Further Reading

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