SAP IT Operations Analytics (SAP ITOA) is an analytics solution that helps IT get a comprehensive view of their IT landscape by collecting data from log files, SAP Host Agent, and master data. This makes root cause analysis faster, reduces time to resolution for issues, helps IT understand the business impact of issues, and enables Predictive Analytics across the datacenter.
Solution Manager (SolMan) and its counterpart Focused Run (FRUN) are monitoring tools for SAP applications.
The emergence of SAP ITOA tends to invoke questions about how it compares to Solution Manager.
In short—SAP ITOA and SAP SolMan go together like wine and cheese (or wine and chocolate if you’re me).
When you look at the origins of both products it’s easy to see the compatibility:
- SAP SolMan was built to monitor SAP applications and provide alerts
- SAP ITOA was built to give IT analytics on the health and performance of their IT landscape (mainly infrastructure like hardware, network, and storage) and enable rich analytics
You can’t run an application without infrastructure. And bare metal isn’t much fun with no software. Often was presents as an application issue can be a symptom of the infrastructure, so understanding the relationship between the two is critical.
While SAP ITOA has the ability to go up the stack (to applications), and SAP SolMan can go down the stack (to infrastructure), we both have a “sweet spot”. Together we bring the most comprehensive solution for understanding SAP application performance in the context of your IT landscape.
Another big differentiator is the nature of the analytics content. SAP Solution Manager provides highly formatted, turn-key dashboards without much intervention required from the end customer. Because SolMan is model driven they are able to deliver this, but lack some flexibility in designing highly customized dashboards based on the end consumer. SAP IT Operations Analytics provides some content, but it’s real strength is that it is a blank canvas enabling you to build highly customized, interactive dashboards and queries from a variety of data sources—including non-IT data.
Brining it all together
SAP Focused Run together with SAP ITOA allows customers to combine the advantages of pre-delivered and highly standardized content in the system and application management area with the flexibility to integrate customer-specific data sources especially from the IT infrastructure layer and define individual data analysis and root-cause analysis scenarios on top of this data.
As a part of our
roadmap, SAP ITOA will be able to deliver alerts directly to Focused Run solutions, so issues at the infrastructure level will be easily visable in Focused Run. This will enable the SAP Basis admin to easily understand if application issues could be the result of underlying infrastructure.
Currently both tools can ingest data from SAP Host Agent, so you can leverage your investments installing SAP Host Agent for SolMan within SAP ITOA.
To learn more about Solutoin Manager and it’s integrations, visit
this whitepaper, you can learn more about SAP ITOA at
www.sap.com/itoa.
