Cloud Operations Best Practices for SAP Integrated Business Planning Run Operations

Run Operations for SAP software systems and services are typically embedded in the organizational and procedural models and practices of Customer Center of Expertise (CCOE) and therein the Operations Control Center (OCC). The latter is responsible for the two main processes of Run Operations scenario Detect-to-Correct: Event Management and Continuous Improvement.

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Customer Center of Expertise with Operations Control Center

See the appendix for further documentation of Operations Control Center topics. In this document, operations topics specifically for running SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP) are suggested and outlined. The intention is to provide and refer to a list of Cloud Operations Knowledge Base Articles (KBAs), which address these operations topics, and which have been made available for SAP IBP. This article focuses on operations challenges for which the customer of an as a Service software is responsible for according to the simplified Cloud Responsibility Model (displaying only public cloud).

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Simplified Cloud Responsibility Model: Roles and Responsibilities for Different Deployment Options

Please note: While SAP’s Customer Center of Expertise and Operations Control Center concepts are aligned and compliant with standards such as ITIL, the operations topics or challenges listed below are more functional in nature, i.e. represent a framework for activities in an Operations team or applications, features, and functions of an Operations toolset – rather than a structured set of processes. However, these activities mapped to functionality are part of the ITIL processes Event Management and Continual Improvement and hence part of the OCC and CCOE organizational model.

Knowledge Base Article: 3011150 – SAP IBP Operations Best Practice: Organizational Model

Application Monitoring and Metering

Application monitoring provides application specific insights in cloud services and systems, including background job monitoring, availability monitoring, performance monitoring, configuration and change monitoring, access and security monitoring, usage monitoring and metering as well as potentially further aspects.

Goal: Ensure the healthiness of application processing and measure the basic quality and usage of services.

Knowledge Base Article: 3011130 – SAP IBP Operations Best Practice: Application Monitoring and Metering

Technical and Business Process Analytics and Improvement

Technical Analytics and Improvement allows the analysis and visualization of technical data and exceptions.

Business Process Analytics and Improvement allows the analysis and visualization of business documents/transactional throughput and backlog data as well as quality of master data.

Goal: Ensure the structured and visual identification of functional painpoints for improvement purposes.

Knowledge Base Articles:

3011166 – SAP IBP Operations Best Practice: Technical Analytics and Improvement

3011182 – SAP IBP Operations Best Practice: Business Process Analytics and Improvement

Data Management

Data Management ensures consistency and integrity of data as well as data interoperability and data volume management.

Goal: Ensure that data models and storage are documented, data volume is monitored and analyzed, initial and delta data loads are governed and logged – error situations being resolvable by repeated data loads not leading to permanent data inconsistencies.

Knowledge Base Article: 3011137 – SAP IBP Operations Best Practice: Data Management, Data Consistency Procedures/Contents

Event and Alert Management

Event & Alert Management allows to handle events and alerts efficiently and efficiently, consuming data from the monitoring use cases and calculating alerts to be followed up with the help of predefined root cause analysis and alert follow up procedures/guides (including notification management and automatic event reaction).

Goal: Ensure the structured, guided, immediate follow up of events and correction of alerts – anytime and in consistent quality.

Knowledge Base Article: 3011118 – SAP IBP Operations Best Practice: Event & Alert Management, Incident Management, and Problem Management

Integration Monitoring

Integration Monitoring provides near-real-time monitoring of interface calls and/or message flows, i.e. the handling of single message flows processed by SAP Cloud Platform Integration as well as peer-to-peer interface usage via REST service or SOAP service calls.

Goal: Ensure the healthiness of interfaces and interface steps of business services and detect anomalies of interface executions.

Knowledge Base Article: 3011172 – SAP IBP Operations Best Practice: Integration Monitoring

Integration with 3^rd Party ITSM Tools and Systems

Inbound and outbound integration from and to application management toolsets and systems ensures a best of breed approach for Operations.

Goal: Ensure that APIs and content templates for metrics, events, KPIs/PPIs, scores etc. are available on all relevant granularity levels – at least for data consumption by unified operations platforms aka managing systems.

Knowledge Base Article: 3011120 – SAP IBP Operations Best Practice: Integration with 3rd Party Tools and Systems