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TCS ERP on Cloud
TCS ERP on Cloud for SAP Landscape Migration and Modernization
Highlights
- Monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) is critical for SAP administrators to ensure their applications' best possible performance and availability.
- Organizations' leading challenge is the lack of automated tools that allow administrators to monitor the entire infrastructure and applications, including third-party interfaces, in a single view with an alerting mechanism.
- SAP administrators should consider aspects such as application availability, underlying database, application performance, crucial transactions, and associated business-critical interfaces when devising their monitoring strategy.
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Overview
Manual monitoring is time-consuming and error-prone. The main challenge faced by organizations is the need for more automated tools. These allow administrators to monitor the entire infrastructure and applications, including third-party interfaces, in a single view, along with alert management and triage. Tools are available, but relevant expertise is required to configure each KPI to trigger the alerts. Organizations often use multiple tools to monitor the underlying infrastructure, SAP application, related interfaces, and other technological components. Tracking KPIs is critical for SAP administrators and IT teams to ensure the best possible performance and availability of their business-critical SAP applications. Application failure or downtime can negatively impact revenue and profitability.
This blog describes how to make SAP systems efficient by precisely tracking key application KPIs to achieve high availability, reduce downtime, improve performance, and maintain overall system stability. Proactive, integrated monitoring rather than reactive monitoring is the key here. Early failure detection can prevent a complete shutdown of SAP systems. The blog covers vital points that SAP administrators must consider while devising their monitoring strategy.
System monitoring
System availability indicates whether an SAP application is online and available to users. Monitoring should include all the application instances configured in the SAP landscape. It should also cover the underlying physical server/VM, connectivity, and database. Monitoring will only be effective if automated tools track the parameters in real-time and generate alerts with log details for a quick resolution.
Database monitoring
If the underlying databases aren't appropriately managed, SAP application instances can cease to work. For example, if the database size is full, all running transactions are terminated, and the database with related applications becomes unavailable for users. The database must be backed up regularly for easy data recovery and to restore applications quickly. It can experience slowness while taking a backup due to the long gap between backups. Database Admins (DBAs) should monitor the time taken for backup, the success and failure of the backup process, and the recoverability of backups.
DBA’s work continues. They must investigate expensive and active SQL statements running in the databases. If these statements continue to run for a long time, businesses can lose a lot of money. Additionally, one should keep a tab on the database's growth, response time, cache hit ratio, and expensive and active SQL statements to keep the database system healthy and performing efficiently.
App performance
Application performance is linked to employee productivity and business revenue. Not monitoring it may lead to slower response time, system overload, and unplanned downtime. Automated tools help proactively monitor KPIs (CPU utilization, memory utilization, user load, etc.) and alert administrators to take necessary action.
T-code monitoring
Crucial transaction monitoring is required to ensure a healthy and stable SAP application. It helps keep the systems running, minimize downtime and service outages, and eliminate business impact. Automated monitoring of all crucial transaction codes (ABAP dumps, failed jobs, SSL certificates, etc.) reduces issue leakage, monitoring effort, and troubleshooting time.
Interface monitoring
Interfaces transfer critical data related to payroll, finance, accounting, and other vital business processes. If data delivery fails, it leads to fulfilment and compliance issues. Monitoring the end-to-end flow of all the business-critical interfaces configured within the SAP system is necessary. Key interface monitoring areas include verification of RFC connections for all critical RFCs, transactional RFC, inbound/outbound queue RFC, and others. Tools that give a view of the customer's entire system landscape with the availability status of configured applications, databases, business-critical interfaces, and other aspects should be considered.
To conclude, SAP administrators must define and track the KPIs while devising their monitoring strategy. Tracking KPIs through automated monitoring and using the right tools is crucial for improving system performance and availability, minimizing the risk of downtime and business disruptions, and enabling the smooth functioning of SAP applications.
