More than three quarters of the world’s transaction revenue touches a SAP system, and SAP workloads represent some of an organization’s most critical and deeply-integrated applications. For the Fortune 1000, the average cost of a critical application failure per hour is $500,000 to $1 million—and that’s before factoring in the damage to brand value. It’s no wonder that stabilizing and improving the performance of their existing SAP landscape is top of mind for many enterprises.
AppDynamics realized early on that in order to offer our global customers true end-to-end monitoring, we needed to cover the entire SAP ecosystem. A couple of years ago, we launched our SAP ABAP Agent and now have customers across all major industry verticals. We provide comprehensive coverage of the SAP landscape, all the way from end user monitoring to SAP applications, databases and endpoints.
Here are the problems we are trying to solve:
- The majority of SAP is still on SAP ECC (ERP Central Component) and written in ABAP, a programming language for developing business applications in the SAP environment. Other APM tools are unable to instrument ABAP code, making it challenging to discover the root cause of problems and diagnose performance issues experienced by SAP applications.
- Traditionally, businesses use 10+ monitoring tools to gain visibility into their IT landscape. These monitoring tools live in siloes, creating significant operational complexity and noisy alert storms when no single issue is to blame, but rather multiple minor issues across disparate systems.
- SAP is typically a black box, which leads to a lack of business context in understanding how it fits into the larger enterprise landscape. This prevents organizations from correlating application performance issues to the end user’s experience and slows issue prioritization.
- Traditional SAP diagnostic tools are reactive in nature and try to diagnose the issue after it has occurred.
Let’s find out how to be more proactive and less reactive.
AppDynamics SAP Monitoring Features
Easy Visualization of Bottlenecks
AppDynamics’ Application Intelligence Platform provides a real-time flow map/topography with a detailed view of every SAP and non-SAP component in an environment. This helps with easy visualization of bottlenecks and issues.
AppDynamics provides visual insight into the health and workings of your heterogeneous application environment.
The AppDynamics Transaction Scorecard provides a summary of the application’s health based on 100% of the business transactions flowing through the app.
Capture Deep Diagnostics for Rapid RCA
Out of the box, AppDynamics establishes Dynamic Baselines for the entire application and every related metric. When application metrics start deviating from the baseline, we capture deep diagnostics in the form of snapshots, which help with root-cause analysis and issue resolution. AppDynamics provides ABAP code-level visibility with Call Graphs.
An ABAP Call Graph in AppDynamics lists every line of executed ABAP code, broken down by the percentage of time each line takes to run. The Call Graph automatically narrows down to the line that takes the most time to execute.
Data collector displaying top 5 slow ABAP statements and top 5 slow SQL statements.
Proactive and Real-Time Alerts
AppDynamics can generate notifications or take other actions based on conditions you configure. Using our alert and respond feature, you can learn about potential problems as they happen, or even before they happen, when you define alerts on warning conditions.
Create an event for SAP IDOCs of interest, such as those that are failing, to associate policies with the event for alerting.
If the connection to the RFC destination ED2_DEMO is failing, create an event to associate policies with it for alerting.
Key Use Cases
Use Case 1: Application performance monitoring of SAP workloads
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- On-prem
- Cloud environments
Use Case 2: Migration of SAP Workloads
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- Cloud
- S/4 HANA
SAP is keen to have its customers move to SAP HANA. To incentivize them it has announced plans to end support for SAP legacy products, such as ECC and R/3, by December 2027. Only five years remain to complete the migration to HANA, and we’re starting to see a lot of customers planning a migration to S/4 HANA.
The Cisco AppDynamics Advantage
AppDynamics benefits enterprises by deploying an industry-best APM solution, providing fully programmable infrastructure, and by creating additional value for customers using the Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS), Cisco HyperFlex systems, and Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI). AppDynamics can quickly map infrastructure on Cisco devices and digital processes across the enterprise to identify and resolve application issues before they negatively affect users. With AppDynamics, application development and support teams can eliminate multiple cycles of debugging and problem resolution, and IT organizations can be proactive in their monitoring.
The integration of AppDynamics software with Cisco technology enhances the breadth of monitoring and management coverage, while collapsing the overall view into a single consolidated source. As correlated data is introduced from the full environment, models become more comprehensive and allow operators from all IT segments to monitor them and act more effectively.
Cisco Validated Design (CVD) for FlexPod Datacenter for SAP Solution with Cisco UCS
What’s Next?
Watch our on-demand webinar on SAP migration and monitoring with Chris Williams – Senior SAP Consultant, AWS; Vani Thiruvengadam – Lead SAP Solutions Architect, AppDynamics; and Rich Lane – Senior Analyst Infrastructure & Operations, Forrester.
After the webinar, read more about AppDynamics for SAP. And stay tuned for the second part of our SAP blog series on AppDynamics for SAP.
