Because of its strategic importance, and the complexity that requires specialized knowledge, SAP systems are usually managed independently from other systems and applications by SAP Basis administrators and IT consultants. However, existing monitoring tools and practices have presented several challenges to SAP administrators.
Slow resolution to system or process issues
The slow resolution to system or process issues within SAP systems is rooted in several key factors, including:
- Manual process: When an incident occurs within any SAP system, it can be a manual, time-consuming process to detect, attribute the root cause, and resolve the issue as users will likely have to log in to various SAP instances and different systems to identify the underlying cause of the issue.
- Multiple logins: Once in a SAP system a user may have to dig deeper into different screens, tables, or extensive logs in order to best understand the problem.
- Data silos: One organizational department may be contacting IT for help with a particular problem, but IT does not have a comprehensive business view of the entire process and may be looking at the issue from a "limited perspective.”
- Changes: Continuous system changes are constantly occurring, and updates are being implemented, making it increasingly difficult to gauge the impact of those changes on the environment and the overall business process.
Evolve from monitoring to intelligent observability
Monitoring is prevalent among SAP customers. Although observability doesn’t replace monitoring, it does amplify it by integrating large volumes of data and applying artificial intelligence (AI) for additional insights. By working hand in hand, observability and monitoring play a crucial role in enhancing the customer experience by proactively mitigating system disruptions. According to Kevin Yang, senior manager, SAP Software Engineering at New Relic:
Understand system health at a glance—out of the box
It’s crucial to be able to visually assess system-wide health at a glance across all SAP and non-SAP user experiences, clouds, applications, services, and infrastructure. Now everyone can share and see the same data in easy-to-understand dashboards. By correlating infrastructure health, application performance, and digital customer experience in a single location, and instantly visualizing system workload status and distributed traces for early detections and root cause analyses, you can eliminate manual work and lag times.
Troubleshoot faster with end-to-end observability
Out-of-the-box dashboards give SAP Basis admins, site reliability engineers (SREs), and business application support teams a single view of infrastructure, applications, and business processes. It's as easy as flipping on a light switch. No more logging into multiple systems, executing multiple transactions, or writing custom reports to get a picture of system health. Centralized end-to-end observability enables you to correlate alerts from SAP and non-SAP systems and processes with system resources and functions, for one interconnected view of your entire ecosystem for faster troubleshooting and resolutions.
RISE with SAP, excel with New Relic
RISE with SAP is a cloud ERP service from SAP that helps businesses move their existing systems to the cloud and transform their processes. New Relic then helps customers optimize system and business process performance by providing performance data for both on-premises and private cloud or hyperscaler hosts without the need to install infrastructure agents. This allows you to benchmark systems performance before and after migration and maintain visibility across your entire ecosystem.
Top takeaways
- The SAP Cockpit enables SAP admins and executives to quickly understand system health at a glance and out of the box, with no clicks or drill downs required.
- Once you select an environment for at-a-glance updates, all views and dashboards are automatically filtered to display data for that environment. See only the data important to you.
- View status and health of systems, hosts, transactions, HANA, IDOCS, RFCs, web services, background jobs, and more in one centralized view.
- See the status of S/4 HANA services, column and row store tables, HANA backup and replication services, and non-HANA databases—all out-of-the-box ready.
- Out-of-the-box dashboards enable users to monitor host-level metrics in private clouds, on-premises, and public cloud infrastructures.
Next steps
Learn more about how SAP customers excel with New Relic. New Relic monitoring for SAPⓇ solutions is generally available as part of its all-in-one observability platform. Get started by contacting your New Relic account representative, or learn more by scheduling a demo.
The views expressed on this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of New Relic. Any solutions offered by the author are environment-specific and not part of the commercial solutions or support offered by New Relic. Please join us exclusively at the Explorers Hub (discuss.newrelic.com) for questions and support related to this blog post. This blog may contain links to content on third-party sites. By providing such links, New Relic does not adopt, guarantee, approve or endorse the information, views or products available on such sites.
