A practical guide to SAP monitoring

Before we cover SAP monitoring and its importance, let’s start with what SAP is. SAP is a well-established software company run by nearly all the world’s largest companies (see startling stats below). SAP enterprise application software enables organizations to effectively manage their complex business processes and functions, like enterprise resource planning (ERP), human resources (HCM), financial management, customer service (CRM), order-to-cash (O2C), procure-to-pay (P2P), and supply chain management (SCM). 

So, when we say “SAP monitoring” we really mean monitoring SAP systems: the applications, databases, and other technology from SAP.

SAP systems centralize data management, which is crucial to efficiently planning, allocating, and deploying resources across complex supply chains and applications. Most SAP applications are designed for high transaction volumes and data flow. And most SAP applications integrate with other applications from SAP and other vendors, as well as with companies’ own home-grown software. SAP software runs on-prem, hybrid, and in the cloud. 

Consider these stats:

• 76% of the world’s transaction revenue touches an SAP system.¹

• SAP customers generate 87% of total global commerce ($46 trillion).² 

• 99% of the world’s largest companies are SAP customers.³

• Enterprise downtime costs can now exceed $1 million to $5 million/hour.⁴ 

Given the critical role SAP systems play, any downtime can be potentially business threatening. To maintain uninterrupted business operations, it’s crucial to ensure SAP systems don’t fail—or even bobble. 

However, while SAP software is nearly ubiquitous, few would claim it’s easy to deploy and maintain, especially in an enterprise context. 

This is where SAP monitoring tools prove invaluable. These tools are essential for maintaining the health, performance, and stability of SAP systems, helping you catch and address issues before they escalate so you can avoid business disruption.

Now, let’s look at the most common SAP monitoring tools and how they can benefit your operations.

SAP monitoring services

SAP monitoring services are services (typically provided by an SAP partner) to assist you with deployment, monitoring, alert response, ticket generation, reporting, incident tracking, and identifying and resolving any availability or health issues within your SAP systems or applications. This lets you focus your company’s IT resources on other critical projects.

It’s worth noting that SAP provides its own “SAP Monitoring Service.” We’ll get to that shortly.

SAP monitoring solutions or tools

SAP monitoring solutions are software applications or suites of monitoring tools that you can deploy on-premises, in the cloud, or in hybrid IT environments. These solutions monitor and alert on SAP application and database performance, security, and compliance issues. Additionally, some can offer deeper insights by correlating ingested data with business goals to help align SAP performance with your organizational objectives.

SAP monitoring platforms

SAP monitoring platforms are integrated sets of tools, services, and technologies within your IT environment. They enable IT teams to monitor and manage all SAP solutions from a single dashboard. Companies with large SAP deployments often rely on them to customize and integrate with IT service management (ITSM) and resource planning processes and to gain a comprehensive view of SAP application performance and availability. 

Like SAP monitoring solutions, platforms use ingested data to deliver business-aligned insights. These often include security features for threat detection and remediation. Some platforms even offer predictive insights to prevent potential issues from escalating.  

SAP applications run core business processes that touch many other systems and areas of the business that consolidate large volumes of data from multiple sources. They’re workhorses, but can be challenging to monitor because:

• You need to monitor more than just SAP applications. Most SAP applications are integrated with many other non-SAP applications. For example, in online retail, when a shopper completes a cart checkout, payment confirmation triggers a series of automated actions across inventory management, shipping, and reporting to fulfill the order.
• SAP has its own proprietary programming language called Advanced Business Application Programming (ABAP®), designed to handle mass data processing within SAP applications. You need code-level visibility into ABAP to pinpoint performance issues across your ecosystem of SAP and connected applications (which we call the SAP landscape). Without it, you’re forced to use separate tools for SAP and its connected systems, making it more difficult and time-consuming to find and fix problems. 
• It’s hard to know what “normal” is. SAP doesn’t have a built-in way to understand normal runtimes or set baselines. Without baselines, any planned or unplanned spikes—for example, month-end closes or year-end sales events—can generate numerous alerts, making it harder to quickly identify and resolve performance issues.

SAP monitoring solutions can support your company goals by keeping your SAP application landscape running smoothly, securely, and compliantly. While many companies initially adopt them to reduce downtime and save employees' time, these tools offer a wide range of benefits.

Maximize availability, performance, and reliability: SAP monitoring helps align SAP use cases with user experience and business goals. With real-time, continuous insights into performance, especially in complex IT environments, you can fix current issues faster and predict—and ideally prevent—future ones. This enhanced monitoring can lead to more reliable user experiences and increased productivity, meaning your customers get faster service and your employees can complete their work more efficiently and accurately. Tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) like response times, transaction speeds, CPU, memory, and disk usage across all your SAP applications, databases, and servers is essential to maintain optimal performance.

Optimize resource usage and capacity planning: Understanding how your SAP resources are used helps you identify trends and make informed decisions about scaling infrastructure before user experience suffers. Tracking CPU, memory, and storage usage across SAP is crucial for planning and maintenance. Insights into hardware utilization can improve capacity planning and reduce costs by highlighting where consolidation is possible. 

Detect and manage issues quickly and efficiently: Establishing a baseline for "normal" behavior in your SAP environment, combined with AI-assisted anomaly detection, helps you proactively identify issues. Customizable alerts and threshold-based monitoring accelerate mean time to detect and resolve (MTTD and MTTR) and reduce alert storms. Real-time alerts help cross-functional teams quickly and proactively identify and address problems. AI and ML can find patterns and alert you to potential issues before they impact your business and, ideally, immediately suggest ways to fix problems or automate responses.

Report and ensure compliance: Most monitoring solutions offer reporting and auditing functions to track compliance with regulatory requirements and internal policies. Detailed metrics are helpful for performance reports, audit trails, and analyzing historical data to streamline processes and workflows.

Facilitate cloud migrations:  Leverage real-time performance insights to identify potential issues early and optimize resources throughout the migration process.

SAP monitoring solutions assist IT teams in many ways, from system availability to user experience, application security, and more. Consider these key use cases where SAP monitoring proves to be particularly beneficial.

System availability and performance: SAP monitoring helps ensure your SAP systems are always available and performing efficiently by quickly identifying and resolving issues. For instance, it can alert you if a crucial server goes down or if there’s a performance bottleneck slowing things down. Think about high-traffic events like Black Friday, where it could help ensure systems can handle traffic surges without crashing. When customers stick around, sales keep flowing.

User experience and response time: Patience runs thin in the modern world, and nobody likes waiting, least of all for technology. SAP monitoring helps you keep an eye on how quickly your systems are responding to user requests. If your employees or customers are experiencing slow load times, you’ll know immediately and can pinpoint the root cause and work to speed things up and keep everyone happily moving along.

Application performance: SAP monitoring provides insights into your applications' performance. For example, if a particular SAP module that handles payroll processing is lagging, you can dig in and fix the problem before payday. Because if there’s another thing people don’t like waiting for, it’s their paycheck.

Application security: Detect unusual activities or potential threats, such as unauthorized access attempts or data breaches. For example, if there’s an unexpected spike in login attempts, you get alerts so you can investigate and take necessary actions to secure your data and maintain normal business operations. Some SAP monitoring solutions go further by: 

• Identifying security risks, such as insights into vulnerabilities that may impact critical application components.
• Detecting application code dependency and configuration-level security vulnerabilities with automatic runtime protection.
• Locating how and where an attack may occur within application workflows like login, search, and checkout and showing you the potential revenue impact.

Business process performance: SAP monitoring helps you understand how well your business processes function. It can track the efficiency of your supply chain or order processing workflows. If there’s a delay in your order fulfillment process, SAP monitoring can uncover where things are getting stuck, help you streamline the process, and ensure customers receive their orders on time.

Migration: Migrating to a new SAP system or moving your existing one to the cloud can be complex. SAP monitoring tools can act as a safety net during these transitions by tracking and comparing performance before, during, and after the migration. 

Read about these real customer examples to learn how you could benefit from SAP monitoring solutions.

Chevron® enhances SAP monitoring and ensures cloud migration success with Cisco AppDynamics 

Chevron, a leading global energy company, relies on a complex ecosystem of 8,000 applications. During a shift to the cloud, the company faced significant challenges monitoring its critical SAP environments, where any downtime risked supply chain disruption and financial losses.

To address these issues, Chevron used AppDynamics Monitoring for SAP Solutions. This solution provided deep visibility down to the ABAP code level, allowing them to pinpoint scaling issues and inefficiencies within SAP. It also improved user experience monitoring with SAP Fiori. By centralizing SAP monitoring and enhancing user experience insights, Chevron improved the reliability and performance of its critical applications. Watch the on-demand Cisco Live session to learn more. 

Carhartt® streamlines SAP monitoring and optimizes performance across its hybrid environment

Carhartt, an American clothing company, was having issues managing its hybrid IT environment, which included on-premises ERP systems, cloud-based inventory and warehouse systems, and third-party e-commerce services. A lack of unified, real-time visibility and automation across these systems led to operational inefficiencies and increased downtime risks. Adopting AppDynamics gave the company comprehensive operational insights and a much-needed unified view of critical applications, including SAP S/4HANA. AppDynamics helped them improve system performance, reduce downtime, and support their digital transformation. Read more. 

“AppDynamics is the only solution to offer visibility into every corner of our environment and identify areas of weakness and opportunity.” – Tim Masey, VP of IT Infrastructure & Security, Carhartt 

Cepheid® gains unprecedented visibility into the performance of all its mission-critical SAP business applications

Cepheid, a leading biotech company, was challenged to ensure SAP uptime and performance. Disparate monitoring tools proved to be inefficient and costly, so they transitioned to a comprehensive full-stack solution in AppDynamics. AppDynamics for SAP Monitoring Solutions enables Cepheid to quickly understand all dependencies across its systems, allowing them to automatically baseline, identify, and isolate the root cause of problems before users can be impacted. When an issue does arise, finding and remediating the problem is faster than ever so that mission-critical applications—and the business—stay up and running. Read more. 

“AppDynamics is the foundation by which we can relate system and application downtime into process downtime for an overall business impact analysis.” – Sandeep Raikar, Director @IT Infrastructure at Cepheid

SAP monitoring solutions and vendors share a common goal: helping organizations protect and ensure the performance and uptime of their SAP systems. While a single solution or tool may address multiple aspects of monitoring, there are six main areas these tools typically cover: 

1. System: Monitor servers, operating systems (OSes), and network components for system health, availability, performance, and IT resource utilization.
2. Application performance monitoring (APM): Monitor performance and availability of any customized or out-of-the-box SAP apps—for example, SAP ERP or SAP HANA—to proactively find and remove issues related to transaction response times, user interactions, application logs, and overall user experience.
3. Database: Monitor database specific to SAP systems for performance issues related to query execution times, disk usage, and database locks.
4. Security: Monitor and alert on security vulnerabilities, ideally providing insight into the likelihood and impact of issues with suggested remediation to lessen potential disruption or damage.   
5. End-to-end: Monitor your entire SAP landscape via a centralized, comprehensive dashboard from one vendor, covering your SAP systems, apps, databases, and security.
6. Cloud: Monitor SAP cloud-native apps, cloud infrastructure, virtual machines (VMs), containers, and other SAP application-related cloud services.

Let’s address the elephant in the room: SAP offers its own monitoring tool, SAP Solution Manager (affectionately known as SolMan), and you might wonder why you should not just use it. 

SAP Solution Manager monitors data within SAP environments. It doesn’t provide a complete picture for identifying, diagnosing, and fixing issues across the entire ecosystem. Moreover, SAP Solution Manager is neither an End User Monitoring (EUM) tool nor a dedicated Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) tool, so it doesn’t correlate issues directly with end-user experiences. 

To ensure you get the right SAP monitoring tool, consider asking potential vendors some of the following key questions to address these gaps.

SAP landscape:

• Does the solution provide monitoring and observability of your SAP applications and the many other applications they connect to, including those not from SAP?
• Does the solution provide insights into the components of the SAP landscape that can be optimized to help reduce cost? 
• Can the solution identify problems related to capacity in your SAP environment?

Function and features: 

• What’s included in the monitoring solution? Does it have everything you need? For instance, does it monitor applications, systems, databases, infrastructure, and logs?
• Does it include features related to monitoring that you need, such as Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM)?
• What monitoring capabilities can you customize? For example, can you customize dashboards?
• Can you customize thresholds for alerting?
• Which parts are automated? For example, does the tool automatically establish performance baselines and alert you when deviations occur? Can it automate response and remediation?
• Does it do any security monitoring, such as user logins and their authorization, system security, or connectivity?

AI / ML: 

• Does the solution use AI and ML to identify trends and predict issues?
• Does the solution use AI to suggest solutions when something goes wrong?
• Does the solution automatically benchmark “normal” to detect performance that is out of range based on historical baselines?

Scalability:

• Can the monitoring solution scale as your SAP solutions grow?
• If you add other SAP products to the environment, will the monitoring solution work as-is or need additional integration support? How much would that cost?

Visibility:

• Does the monitoring solution provide real-time visibility into application performance before, during, and after a migration or upgrade?
• Does the solution track and identify performance for business transactions within core SAP ERP?
• Does the solution provide pre-packaged and/or fully customizable dashboards so you can perform side-by-side comparative analysis between production and canary deployments or bring in business performance analytics to compare with application and system performance?  
• Can you monitor the health of business processes that rely on the SAP landscape, such as Order to Cash, Procure to Pay, etc.?

Risk mitigation:

• Does the solution allow you to quickly mitigate risks and address potential impacts before users transition to the new deployment? Or before your team makes changes to the production environment?
• Does the monitoring solution give you insights into the business risk associated with issues so that you can prioritize what to work on?

Implementation and integration:

• What resources will you need to configure, deploy, and maintain the solution?
• What are the vendor’s infrastructure and licensing requirements?
• Can admins access the tools remotely?
• Is the solution a seamless integration? If not, what/who is required?
• What is the expected time from access to value?
• Does the solution create extra overhead?

Support and maintenance:

• What type of training is available? How long will it take?
• Is there self-serve documentation and/or a user community in place?
• How do software updates happen? 
• Other than updates, what other business processes are involved?
• If the tool goes down, can you recover the collected data?

Analytics and reporting:

• What methods are used to collect and report performance data? How reliable are they? For example, does the vendor use agents, webservices, APIs, etc.?
• What reporting is available, and how is that information collected? Can you easily customize reports yourself (DIY)?
• Can the monitoring tool provide predictive analytics on SAP performance?

Cost and ROI:

• What are the expected benefits of reducing downtime vs. how much downtime currently costs?
• What typical savings are tied to improving performance for employee productivity and customer satisfaction?
• How does the initial implementation cost compare to the anticipated ROI? Are there case studies or industry benchmarks to support these projections? 

Creating an effective SAP monitoring strategy doesn't have to be complicated. In fact, it’s as easy as 1, 2, 3. Well, maybe more like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. 

1. Set goals. Start by defining your goals and KPIs to measure success. What do you want to achieve? Maybe it’s minimizing downtime, optimizing performance, or ensuring compliance. 
2. Assess the current environment. Take inventory of all your SAP systems, modules, and related parts, like ERP, HANA, S/4HANA, and any third-party integrations. Understand how these pieces interact and consider what other tools may be coming in to get a clear picture of your SAP landscape, not just for production. 
3. Define monitoring expectations. Work with stakeholders to clarify what to monitor and how stakeholders will use the resulting data. Examples include systems, modules, interfaces, critical business processes, infrastructure, databases, etc.
4. Choose tools to review. Determine which tools will meet the needs and ask for demos and more specifics. But don’t forget the importance of choosing a monitoring solution that offers end-to-end visibility—including ABAP code-level visibility. 
5. Implement and configure. Customize dashboards and set up real-time monitoring and alerting to automatically notify you about potential issues before they impact users. 
6. Continuously optimize. Create review and improve cycles. Gather and analyze data on system performance and user transactions to understand where you may need to refine parameters, fine-tune alerts, tweak configurations, scale resources, and apply patches. 

In general, SAP monitoring solutions should help your Basis Admins, Database Admins, and IT Operations focus on achieving business outcomes, not just constantly reacting to issues. Look for: 

• Full-stack observability that covers SAP applications and non-SAP applications, wherever they reside (self-managed, hybrid, cloud), dependencies, as well as identification of where issues may occur anywhere in your application infrastructure stack, including the network. 
• Real-time visibility into application performance before, during, and after a migration or upgrade. Custom dashboards that let you develop a comparative analysis—contrasting side-by-side production and canary deployments. 
• The ability to quickly mitigate risks and address impacts before users transition to the new deployment or teams make changes to the production environment. 
• Productivity improvements through artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to set baselines to detect anomalies, proactively identify risks, and recommend or automate remediation. 
• Business context that shows you how any issues impact your business metrics.

AppDynamics Monitoring for SAP Solutions gives you a comprehensive understanding of your SAP environment’s health, performance, and user satisfaction while keeping all your applications up and running smoothly.

Detect, isolate, and troubleshoot SAP performance issues.

• The low-overhead agent quickly detects performance issues and pinpoints the root cause to a single line of ABAP code or database query.
• Code-level transaction snapshots capture diagnostic information when performance is impacted.
• It tracks the entire stack through SAP and non-SAP systems.
• It monitors SAP's most critical areas, including IDocs, DB Locks, work processes, and remote function calls (RFCs).

Gain insights into the performance of the entire SAP ecosystem.

• Flow maps based on live traffic visualize all SAP dependencies in on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments.
• Intelligent alerts notify IT teams when SAP performance deviates from the baseline.
• Get comprehensive analytics to understand the real-time performance and impact of your programs. 
• Get day-one value with 35+ pre-configured dashboards and over 350 metrics/KPIs.

Monitor and troubleshoot SAP HANA® databases in the context of ABAP applications.

• Monitor SAP HANA server health and performance.
• Identify and improve queries that consume excessive system resources, such as CPU or memory.
• Optimize query performance via Query Explain Plans.

Drive value with comprehensive capabilities for SAP ERP.

• Manage risk and decrease mean time to identify (MTTI) and mean time to resolve (MTTR).
• Tie insights, analytics, and alerts to the business and monitor the health of key business processes and workflows.
• Eliminate static thresholds on alerting—get more precise alerts with dynamic thresholds that adjust to normal performance patterns.

Maintain the stability and reliability of SAP systems.

• Automate and slash MTTR of SAP runtime error root cause analysis and recommend solutions through ST22 log collection.
• Identify and remediate authorization issues through proactive KPIs and events related to possible non-conformance in user, authorization, connection, and system change policies.

Achieve rapid ROI and payback

A recent Forrester® Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study showed how organizations have seen a 359% ROI over three years and payback in less than six months with Cisco’s full-stack observability solutions, including AppDynamics Monitoring for SAP Solutions.

SAP monitoring tools can aid SAP migrations, upgrades, and new integrations. 

For example, many organizations are moving their on-premises workloads and applications to the cloud (AWS, Azure) or transitioning their legacy SAP systems to S/4HANA® because SAP support for ERP Central Component (ECC) ends in 2027.  Other relevant migrations include upgrades within S/4HANA (like moving from S/4HANA 2019 to 2021), changing hardware, or integrating new systems.

These migrations vary in complexity and cost. Moving from ECC to S/4HANA and moving on-premises systems to the cloud are typically the most complex and expensive, often taking years and involving significant multi-million-dollar investments. But whether the changes are large or small, they require careful planning and execution.

That’s why it's so important to have effective monitoring and management tools to facilitate the process—tools like, you guessed it, AppDynamics Monitoring for SAP Solutions.

By implementing AppDynamics Monitoring for SAP Solutions before you migrate, you can monitor and compare the full results of the ongoing migration before, during, and after the process. You'll have the insights you need to fully understand when cloud applications are ready to launch, which helps ensure a smooth migration experience.

To further ensure the best user experience, consider these additional features of AppDynamics Monitoring for SAP Solutions:

• Application flow maps with automatic business-transaction detection help ensure a smooth transition to S/4HANA.
• Landscape visualization of all connections to SAP environments facilitates risk management during cloud migrations and upgrades.
• Configuration change monitoring tracks and reports changes to maintain system integrity.
• Real-time views into performance metrics provide valuable insight for applications and program owners.

Ready to transform your SAP monitoring strategy with full-stack observability into your SAP landscape? Get started by scheduling a demo with one of our experts at AppDynamics.