For many organizations, SAP forms the basis for their business operations. Insight into the functioning of (primary) processes in which SAP is involved, is therefore essential. Current SAP monitoring solutions are often time-consuming and costly to implement and provide too little information about the business process as a whole. Ymor offers a unique SAP performance monitoring solution that makes the ‘black SAP box’ transparent and provides end-to-end insight into business processes.
The Challenge
Because SAP systems facilitate important business processes, IT organisations strive to ensure that the processes within and around SAP run as smoothly as possible, without downtime and without disruptions. However, the performance of SAP systems is now often only known in SAP Solution Manager or Focussed Run. The functioning of the entire business process of which the SAP system is a part, is at best transparent within APM solutions that do not support SAP. In other words: a blind spot within a business-critical chain.
When there is a disruption or stagnation in the process, a status message is triggered that ‘something does not work’. But what output is not pushed to the next system? And what does this mean for adjacent systems or the entire business process? In order to repair or optimize this, SAP-specific tools are needed that do not always provide all the necessary insights. Moreover, the business process consists of more than just SAP, so data about the rest of the process is also relevant.
From reactive to preventive with SAP monitoring
At the moment, organizations can only act reactively within a closed ecosystem with SAP Solution Manager or Focussed Run. These products are indispensable in any SAP landscape, but do not offer the same insights as APM solutions. With SAP performance monitoring from Ymor, this is broken down into structurally transparent insight with which problems can be proactively addressed – or even prevented.
Ymor, part of Sentia, offers a datalake where SAP metrics and process data – from standard to custom Z transactions – can be accessed. Based on these insights, dashboarding, alerting and reporting are then realized. This results in near real-time insights (technical or process), tailored to the business chain involved. With Ymor SAP monitoring, City, Idoc, security, process or DBA cockpit information can be collected and visualized as desired across multiple SAP systems.
How does this work in practice?
An example is the analysis of a financially critical business process across a chain with Mendix, Tibco and SAP. Based on messages and Idocs, each step can be made comprehensible and the success of the processing can be measured. With this, the organization can guarantee that suppliers are paid the right amount, on the right time (which in this case is an important objective for the customer). Another example is the analysis of the database impact of a batch job: this requires information from both the business and IT. Previously, data from different silos had to be collected and correlated manually. This solution makes it possible to monitor and combine jobs in real time with other – already available – data, making reactive and manual management of jobs a thing of the past.
Ymor uses Splunk to unlock all SAP data and to correlate with other relevant data sources. Using a pre-defined transport, software is delivered containing the unlocking of the datalake. By bringing this to production, organizations can decide for themselves what they find relevant to read, and thus keep a grip on costs. By using the SAP standard functionality for the installation, the implementation of this SAP monitoring solution is easy to carry out. The installation is a matter of minutes per SAP system.
What does it yield?
The most important result of Ymor’s SAP monitoring is to make the SAP business processes transparent. By understanding the SAP data and combining it with existing APM insights, the functioning of business processes becomes end-to-end transparent. An advantage is that all information can be retrieved, so that an analysis moment never has to be missed. SAP-transcending data correlation takes place, providing insight into the business process as a whole.
The result:
- End-to-end insight
- Lower costs;
- More efficient SAP landscape management;
- Get a grip on the quality of business processes;
- One dashboard for all SAP monitoring data.
Talk to one of our experts about SAP performance monitoring.
