With SAP’s large customer base with a long history of on-premise setups, many SAP customers are expected to face hybrid applications that span several environments (on-premise and cloud) – today and for the years to come. Just think of the option to quickly extend applications running in on-premise backend systems with SAP Cloud Platform.
For those hybrid scenarios, customers that already have an on-premise operation infrastructure in place seek to get the option to “plug-in” also cloud parts into existing supportability procedures and tools – even if they might strive to transform to a cloud-centric operations approach in the long run (for which we are also working on corresponding operations offerings, not covered here). Also, new approaches might be required to handle applications that are running distributed in different environments.
In this blog post, I would like to provide a rough overview of corresponding hybrid supportability offerings for customers that are using SAP Solution Manager for their operations. I will put a special focus on offerings for SAP Cloud Platform, as I see it as integral part for on-premise extension scenarios.
As a result, this post outlines only a certain fraction of available options and approaches. Of course, there are further offerings available, also without usage of SAP Solution Manager – including third-party offerings – that you might use for the reliable operation of hybrid applications, such as for monitoring SAP Cloud Platform applications. Those are not handled here. In addition, I want to make clear that I am not part of the SAP Solution Manager organization, although I am working closely with the experts from that area.
After this motivation and “positioning” of this blog post, let’s look at what SAP Solution Manager has to offer for hybrid SAP Cloud Platform applications today. The following figure provides a corresponding overview:
Figure 1: Overview of hybrid supportability offerings from SAP Solution Manager
With hybrid scenarios, you might have to exchange data across several environments, maybe even using several distributed integration components. With Integration Monitoring, you can monitor SAP Cloud Platform integration errors and performance metrics, including different integration components, such as SAP Cloud Platform Integration and SAP Process Integration and Orchestration.
In addition, you can visualize end-to-end integration scenarios, running in SAP Cloud and on-premise.
Figure 2: Integration Monitoring
For more information about Integration Monitoring, see SAP Help Portal.
Even if your hybrid scenario spans several environments, you want to get all relevant exceptions centrally in one view and not distributed to several views and cockpits that you have to monitor in parallel.
With Exception Management, you can retrieve and centrally handle business-critical exceptions for your hybrid applications, running on SAP Cloud Platform and on-premise. With this, you get the exceptions for all landscapes involved in your hybrid application in one place and are able to handle those – no matter, if simple (technical, single) or complex ones (cross-component, process-flow driven, multi-step). For example, you can get details, assign an expert to an exception, create a notification or incident, or offer a predefined guided procedure for handling the exception quickly.
Figure 3: Exception Management
For more information about Exception Management, see SAP Help Portal.
Cloud scenarios can be accessed from many locations throughout the world. Here, local issues (such as of the network infrastructure) might lead to local outages, while the application is still available with good performance from other locations. To ensure the availability of your cloud scenarios from all locations relevant for you, User Experience Monitoring offers an end-to-end measurement of performance and availability of your applications from a synthetic user perspective, based on recorded end-user scenarios that get executed from your different locations towards SAP Cloud.
Figure 4: User Monitoring
For further information, see SAP Help Portal.
To analyze a hybrid app spanning different environments that is facing performance issues, you want to get an overview where most of the time is spent for a certain action inside the app. With the end-to-end Trace Analysis, you can trigger a trace to drill down and analyze the performance of your applications based on statistical data collected during its execution. That is, you can trace requests to hybrid applications and get application performance data, such as application + UI response times and number of database calls. Also, you get insights about the request path that the processing of the triggered action takes in your hybrid environment, including inbound and outbound request points.
With this information, you can start further investigations on the identified hot spots of the operation.
Figure 5: Trace Analysis
For more information about:
All those offerings are intended to ease the operations of hybrid SAP Cloud Platform applications. I hope you have gained an overview, how SAP Cloud Platform parts can now be “plugged in” into an existing on-premise operations infrastructure you might have already in place. With this overview, you can now further investigate potential suitable approaches for your requirements.
For some of those offerings, we started with a restricted scope – for example, the first version of the exception management allows to get content from the default trace of Java applications. While further improvements are planned, the offerings outlined above are available today – for example, trace analysis is available with SAP Solution Manager 7.2 SP6.
In addition, we are also working on new, additional offerings for an improved operation of your hybrid applications, such as new services in SAP Cloud Platform that you will be able to benefit from optionally also without usage of SAP Solution Manager. Expect to get further insights in the upcoming time!
Again, this blog post only outlined available options for hybrid use cases as offered by SAP Solution Manager for SAP Cloud Platform. Speaking of other options and approaches, expect to hear more about a more holistic overview of SAP Cloud Platform monitoring options in the future in additional blog posts!
Thanks for your interest in this topic and looking forward to any comments or questions you might have :-)!
For those hybrid scenarios, customers that already have an on-premise operation infrastructure in place seek to get the option to “plug-in” also cloud parts into existing supportability procedures and tools – even if they might strive to transform to a cloud-centric operations approach in the long run (for which we are also working on corresponding operations offerings, not covered here). Also, new approaches might be required to handle applications that are running distributed in different environments.
In this blog post, I would like to provide a rough overview of corresponding hybrid supportability offerings for customers that are using SAP Solution Manager for their operations. I will put a special focus on offerings for SAP Cloud Platform, as I see it as integral part for on-premise extension scenarios.
As a result, this post outlines only a certain fraction of available options and approaches. Of course, there are further offerings available, also without usage of SAP Solution Manager – including third-party offerings – that you might use for the reliable operation of hybrid applications, such as for monitoring SAP Cloud Platform applications. Those are not handled here. In addition, I want to make clear that I am not part of the SAP Solution Manager organization, although I am working closely with the experts from that area.
After this motivation and “positioning” of this blog post, let’s look at what SAP Solution Manager has to offer for hybrid SAP Cloud Platform applications today. The following figure provides a corresponding overview:
Figure 1: Overview of hybrid supportability offerings from SAP Solution Manager
Ensure reliable hybrid data exchange with Integration Monitoring
With hybrid scenarios, you might have to exchange data across several environments, maybe even using several distributed integration components. With Integration Monitoring, you can monitor SAP Cloud Platform integration errors and performance metrics, including different integration components, such as SAP Cloud Platform Integration and SAP Process Integration and Orchestration.
In addition, you can visualize end-to-end integration scenarios, running in SAP Cloud and on-premise.
Figure 2: Integration Monitoring
For more information about Integration Monitoring, see SAP Help Portal.
Handle business-critical exceptions of hybrid applications with Exception Management
Even if your hybrid scenario spans several environments, you want to get all relevant exceptions centrally in one view and not distributed to several views and cockpits that you have to monitor in parallel.
With Exception Management, you can retrieve and centrally handle business-critical exceptions for your hybrid applications, running on SAP Cloud Platform and on-premise. With this, you get the exceptions for all landscapes involved in your hybrid application in one place and are able to handle those – no matter, if simple (technical, single) or complex ones (cross-component, process-flow driven, multi-step). For example, you can get details, assign an expert to an exception, create a notification or incident, or offer a predefined guided procedure for handling the exception quickly.
Figure 3: Exception Management
For more information about Exception Management, see SAP Help Portal.
Ensure availability and performance of cloud scenarios from several locations
Cloud scenarios can be accessed from many locations throughout the world. Here, local issues (such as of the network infrastructure) might lead to local outages, while the application is still available with good performance from other locations. To ensure the availability of your cloud scenarios from all locations relevant for you, User Experience Monitoring offers an end-to-end measurement of performance and availability of your applications from a synthetic user perspective, based on recorded end-user scenarios that get executed from your different locations towards SAP Cloud.
Figure 4: User Monitoring
For further information, see SAP Help Portal.
Trace the performance and the transverse path of SAP Cloud Platform apps
To analyze a hybrid app spanning different environments that is facing performance issues, you want to get an overview where most of the time is spent for a certain action inside the app. With the end-to-end Trace Analysis, you can trigger a trace to drill down and analyze the performance of your applications based on statistical data collected during its execution. That is, you can trace requests to hybrid applications and get application performance data, such as application + UI response times and number of database calls. Also, you get insights about the request path that the processing of the triggered action takes in your hybrid environment, including inbound and outbound request points.
With this information, you can start further investigations on the identified hot spots of the operation.
Figure 5: Trace Analysis
For more information about:
- How to perform trace analysis, see SAP Help Portal
- How to configure trace analysis, see this link in SAP Help Portal
Closing words
All those offerings are intended to ease the operations of hybrid SAP Cloud Platform applications. I hope you have gained an overview, how SAP Cloud Platform parts can now be “plugged in” into an existing on-premise operations infrastructure you might have already in place. With this overview, you can now further investigate potential suitable approaches for your requirements.
For some of those offerings, we started with a restricted scope – for example, the first version of the exception management allows to get content from the default trace of Java applications. While further improvements are planned, the offerings outlined above are available today – for example, trace analysis is available with SAP Solution Manager 7.2 SP6.
In addition, we are also working on new, additional offerings for an improved operation of your hybrid applications, such as new services in SAP Cloud Platform that you will be able to benefit from optionally also without usage of SAP Solution Manager. Expect to get further insights in the upcoming time!
Again, this blog post only outlined available options for hybrid use cases as offered by SAP Solution Manager for SAP Cloud Platform. Speaking of other options and approaches, expect to hear more about a more holistic overview of SAP Cloud Platform monitoring options in the future in additional blog posts!
Thanks for your interest in this topic and looking forward to any comments or questions you might have :-)!
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