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Author's profile photo Kiril Gavrailov

Get notified instantly for issues with your cloud application via SAP Cloud Platform Alert Notification

Introduction

Ask yourself a question: what comes to your mind when you think of the specifics of a typical cloud application?

In my mind, it comes that these apps are complex. They typically consist of multiple modules in most of the time written in different languages. Furthermore, a typical cloud app uses a lot of different cloud services. Very often, they use an on-premise backend system and runs into hybrid environment.

And now another question arises: when we have an issue with our productive app, how do we understand where exactly the issue comes from? Does it come from some of the modules of our app, or from the dependencies that we have or from our on-premise backend?

After some research, I couldn’t find some common recipe for that – everyone is tackling this in a different way. For example, some of us watch logs, some build custom dashboards, some code something additional that helps them.

 

 

How does Alert Notification help?

Alert Notification is a brand-new SAP Cloud Platform based service which provides you with the ability to understand instantly whenever there’s an issue with your cloud application or its dependencies. Furthermore, it will notify you via any channel of alert management you like – no matter if this is mail, some sort of corporate chat (like Slack), ticketing system or even SAP Solution Manager or Focused Run for SAP Solution Manager.

Currently, Alert Notification is available for SAP Cloud Platform’s beta accounts and at the beginning of 2019, it will be in GA.

How this works?

Let’s have a look at a simple example below.

Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of DevOps engineers responsible for an application running on SAP Cloud Platform.

Whenever our application is having troubles with the CPU load, SAP Cloud Platform’s Monitoring Service will instantly detect it. Since it is quite well integrated with Alert Notification service, it will tell it that there’s this issue right away. The Alert Notification itself will do two things: first, it will store this alert for 24 hours; second, it will notify us via the channel we want – in this case some sort of corporate chat. Once this is done, we, as DevOps engineers, will be able to act upon this alert. Or even pull the alerts from Alert Notification to another system installed in their ecosystem but outside SAP Cloud Platform. For example, SAP Solution Manager or Focused Run for SAP Solution Manager.

However, knowing only the monitoring data is not enough. What if some of our dependencies are unavailable? Or the database is overloaded? Or if the connectivity with our backend system is okay? The good news is that Alert Notification will support all of these.

On the other side, we might not want to use corporate chat, but might want to use a ticketing system or SAP Solution Manager. Also, here, the good news is that Alert Notification will support all of these as well.

So, if we have to summarize – with Alert Notification you will know instantly of a problem that has occurred in your application, in the services that it uses or in the database, via the channel you want!

How to consume it?

Open SAP Cloud Platform Cloud Cockpit, navigate to a sub-account of yours, go to Services tab and subscribe to Alert Notification. Note that this functionality will be available only for beta accounts.

Once you subscribe, you will be able to see the Alert Notification UI in SAP Cloud Platform Cloud Cockpit

If you click on Create or on some of the available tiles, you will be able to define a new subscription of an Alert (or edit an existing one).

For how to define a subscription, you can also check out our help page .

Once you define a subscription, you can tell via what channel you want to receive this subscription by defining an action.

In our example, we have defined that we want to receive this subscription via mail and also to store it.

For more details on Action, check-out the documentation.

 

Next Steps

Since we’re currently in a guided beta we do call for everyone having a beta account and willing to try out Alert Notification to get in touch with us. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to us as well! We will try to support you fully on consuming the service.

Until the GA phase, we will enhance the service even more by trying to enable as much SAP Cloud Platform services to report their alerts, as possible.

 

Resources

[1] Alert Notification service Documentation

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      15 Comments
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      Author's profile photo Daniele Giannini
      Daniele Giannini

      Hi Kiril, great news!

      Do you know if this will be available also for HTML5 apps deployed on NEO enviroment?

      Many tks.

      Author's profile photo Kiril Gavrailov
      Kiril Gavrailov
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Daniele,

      thank you for your comment!

      The HTML5 apps are on our roadmap, but not yet available.  We're working towards enabling as many services(including html5 apps) on CP as possible and the customer's feedback during the beta can re-prioritize which service will be onboard first. Our main goal is to cover the bigger part of the services.

      Currently, for Neo we support Java, XS apps and also HANA Database.

      Thank you,

      Kiril

      Author's profile photo Ashok Kumar M
      Ashok Kumar M

      Hi Kiril,

      Is this available in both Neo and CF versions of SAP CP?

      Best Regards,

      Ashok.

      Author's profile photo Kiril Gavrailov
      Kiril Gavrailov
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Ashok,

      thanks for your comment!

      The service is available in both environments.

      Kiril

      Author's profile photo Jayant Kumar Nayak
      Jayant Kumar Nayak

      Hi Kiril,

      When are you planning to go GA for Alert Notification service. Moreover is this service available in canary ?

       

      Regards,

      Jayant

      Author's profile photo Nitesh Agrawal
      Nitesh Agrawal

      Hi Kiril,

      Thanks for the post.

      Are there any platform level events that get generated when microservices state changes. From being stopped to starting and finally started.

      If yes, can we subscribe to these kinds of events via Alert Notification service?

      Regards,

      Nitesh

      Author's profile photo Kiril Gavrailov
      Kiril Gavrailov
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Nitesh,

      thank you for the interest and excuse me for my delayed reply 🙂

       

      Currently,, these are not offered. However, these lifecycle management events are in our roadmap so we will deliver it after the GA phase of the Alert Notification service.

      If you need some further details don't hesitate to drop me an email.

       

      Thanks,

      Kiril

      Author's profile photo Soni Subhash
      Soni Subhash

      Hello Kiril, tried to draft you a mail whihc got bounced.. do you have a mail address i can reach you out at?

       

      we have somee suggestions/ inputs and obviuosly questions

      Author's profile photo Kiril Gavrailov
      Kiril Gavrailov
      Blog Post Author

      Dear Soni,

      feel free to reach me  - k.gavrailov at sap dot com

      Author's profile photo André Gruhn
      André Gruhn

      When will it be finally released? Any Roadmap for this?

      Author's profile photo Kiril Gavrailov
      Kiril Gavrailov
      Blog Post Author

      Dear Andrè,

      Alert Notification GA Is planned for the beginning of June. Note that this might change.

      Please expect official blog posts and rollouts including an external roadmap.

       

      Thanks,

      Kiril

      Author's profile photo Florence Mae Guzon
      Florence Mae Guzon

      Hi Kiril,

       

      I'm thinking to try the Alert Notification service, however, I couldn't find it in our list of services. Is this still only available on BETA?

       

      I've read on help.sap.com "If you have been using Alert Notification service during its BETA phase, you now have to reenable the service for productive use. All BETA accounts have been suspended in favor of the full-feature generally available version of the product."

       

      I am using company account in in Neo environment located in Europe (Frankfurt). Should it still be in Beta? Does activating beta features have extra cost?

       

      Regards,

      Florence

      Author's profile photo Kiril Gavrailov
      Kiril Gavrailov
      Blog Post Author

      Dear Florence,

      thank you for your question.

      Alert Notification is now GA since the beginning of June, so you basically can subscribe for it from within any CP account.

      You can read more about the GA here - https://blogs.sap.com/2019/06/05/sap-cloud-platform-alert-notification-is-now-generally-available/

      And also if you checkout this tag, there's a lot of blog post of how you can use ANS for different scenarios: https://blogs.sap.com/tag/sap-cloud-platform-alert-notification/

      In case you have more questions don't hesitate to get in touch!

      Thanks,

      Kiril

      Author's profile photo Florence Mae Guzon
      Florence Mae Guzon

      Thank you, Kiril. I was checking on our CP accounts in Neo environment and I was not able to find the Alert Notification service. Are we missing something here?

       

      Regards,

      Florence

      Author's profile photo Kiril Gavrailov
      Kiril Gavrailov
      Blog Post Author

      Dear Florence,

      thanks for the comment.

      There shouldn't be any limitations.

      Can you get in touch with me via mail  - k.gavrailov at sap dot com

      I will make sure to take the question to the development team.

      Thanks,

      Kiril