3 Ways AppDynamics SAP Solution Improves Your Environment

[Dennis.Horvath]

In today's fast-paced and highly competitive business landscape, organizations rely on robust and efficient enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to streamline operations, enhance productivity, and drive growth. SAP is one of the leading ERP solutions adopted by enterprises worldwide due to its comprehensive suite of applications that cater to various business needs, including finance, logistics, human resources, and supply chain management.

However, the complexity and criticality of SAP environments necessitate continuous monitoring to ensure optimal performance, security, and compliance. Monitoring an SAP environment involves tracking system health, performance metrics, and user activities to identify potential issues before they escalate into significant problems. This proactive approach not only helps maintain system reliability and efficiency but also safeguards sensitive business data and supports regulatory compliance.

Comprehensive Visibility

SAP environments are inherently complex, comprising multiple interconnected components that collectively support critical business functions. This complexity often results in fragmented visibility, making it challenging for IT teams to monitor the entire ecosystem effectively.  While SAP's native monitoring tools such as Solution Manager, CCMS monitoring and Focus Run are robust and well-suited for managing SAP-specific components, they come with certain limitations that can be challenging for organizations with heterogeneous IT landscapes.  They lack comprehensive visibility into non-SAP components, third-party applications, and external services that interact with the SAP environment.  This leads to fragmented monitoring and potential blind spots, like tracing transactions end-to-end, making it difficult to diagnose performance bottlenecks or errors that span beyond SAP components.  SAP Basis Administrators use a variety of transaction codes to troubleshoot an issue, below are some of them.

AppDynamics excels in delivering comprehensive visibility across both SAP and non-SAP components, ensuring that every aspect of the system is monitored and optimized.  AppDynamics allows for end-to-end tracing of business transactions as they flow through various components of the SAP environment. This means that every user action, from the initial request to the final response, can be tracked across different modules, databases, and external services. All this in real time while being baselined, this granular level of visibility helps in pinpointing exactly where performance bottlenecks or errors occur, enabling faster and more accurate troubleshooting. Most of this is done in the background with no user interaction, then laid out in various ways for easy identification of issues.

Daily/Monthly/Quarterly/Yearly Check Lists

By default, SAP systems, like all major systems, need to be looked after to prevent issues from stacking up. These checklists cover various areas within the system, typically including hardware resources, processing utilization, job execution, and updates. These checks are at least performed on production systems and generally take about 10 to 15 minutes per system. This is to ensure the smooth operation of an SAP system and help identify and resolve potential issues before they impact business operations. When problems are detected, it often requires manual troubleshooting and correlation to determine the necessary actions. In such cases, the functional team is involved to coordinate and implement corrective measures. Below is an example of a daily checklist for an ERP system.

AppDynamics takes a proactive stance to monitoring these systems, with 35+ dashboards and 350+ metrics/KPIs out-of-the-box.  These checks could now be automated, removing the human error factor.  AppDynamics supplies default Health Rules on key SAP System Metrics and Events for faster set-up on alerts, effectively switching the environment to being proactive. Giving your organization the ability to identify and resolve issues much faster, ensuring that the SAP system runs smoothly and efficiently. This process of maintenance helps preserve system stability, performance, and security, minimizing the risk of disruptions to business operations.  Ensuring your systems operate efficiently and keep up with end-user demand.                                   

DB Specific Support

SAP provides various tools and functionalities to monitor the databases supporting its environments. While these tools offer valuable insights, they also come with certain boundaries. These native SAP tools often lack comprehensive user experience monitoring capabilities, which are crucial for understanding the end-to-end performance impact on users.  While some historical data analysis is available, it may not be as extensive or detailed as some company’s need.  SAP has been trying to push its customers to move to HANA for some time as they announced support for its ERP systems will end in 2027 unless you move to S/4HANA.  This is no small task, and the SAP management tools leave much to be desired.

AppDynamics supports monitoring a wide range of databases commonly used in SAP environments. This ensures comprehensive visibility and performance management across the entire IT landscape.  AppDynamics provides several OOTB dashboards dedicated to databases with 8 specifically for SAP HANA®, greatly reducing the learning curve. This ensures organizations can maintain optimal performance, reliability, and efficiency in their SAP environments.

Final Thoughts

By leveraging the advanced monitoring, alerting, and automation capabilities of AppDynamics, organizations can significantly reduce or even eliminate many of the manual tasks a Basis person needs to do. AppDynamics provides continuous, real-time visibility into system performance, automates diagnostics and reporting, and proactively alerts IT teams to potential issues to the code level if needed, greatly reducing the time a developer typically gets involved. This not only enhances system reliability and performance but also frees up valuable time for IT staff to focus on strategic initiatives and innovation, rather than routine maintenance tasks.