The following assessment, research and TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) calculations are derived from real customer deployment, upgrades, industry surveys, and monitoring projects for the past 10 years across many size of customers. It is intended to help with budgeting and measuring ROI before investing in Solman as a primary enterprise monitoring platform for SAP environment.
IT-Conductor focused this quarter to increase the ROI for our customer's daily SAP Operations by automating the management of critical areas to minimize disruptions in services and maximizing the availability and performance of systems:
In the last year or so IT-Conductor has been working with several partners and customers to enable smarter SAP migration delivery - especially to cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure and AWS. We are involved at the beginning phases of Assessment through Performance validation, Migration & Monitoring. As we like to phrase it APM-4-APM: Application Performance Management for Assessment of Performance, Planning and Migration.
The restriction on data modification, while a data record is being changed by another user, is to ensure data consistency within an SAP system. This is achieved through the use of enqueue service/lock management mechanism which handles locks in the lock table. This locking concept prevents concurrent access to data records by multiple users which may lead to data inconsistency.
Top down service management involves App, DB, OS and other infrastructure components, performed in a correlated fashion. Identifying performance bottlenecks promptly within the database is very critical for enterprise applications which heavily depend on OLTP or OLAP transactions. Proactive database performance monitoring will prevent incidences that can threaten the stability of your systems. It's imperative therefore to have an effective tool and automated process for monitoring the health of your systems to ensure the continuous availability and performance of mission-critical enterprise applications.
Good application and system design incorporates both high availability and performance. A best practice in monitoring performance is managing workloads as KPIs against system bandwidth/capacity utilization. Establishing performance baselines and constantly monitoring workload KPIs against it as a way of managing service levels.
Most organizations have IT teams responsible for monitoring and managing the infrastructure (OS, Storage, Network), however for SAP Basis teams, it's still very critical to monitor and manage the OS as part of the overall top down/bottom up approach in availability and performance management. It's hard to analyze application or database performance and not have capacity/utilization/bottlenecks of the dependent infrastructure OS/VM/Physical systems.
It's best-practice to regularly back up your operating system and database to restore the SAP system should the need arise. Hence one of the chief responsibilities of an SAP Administrator and/or DBA/SysAdmin is to have an appropriate method for performing this set of duties, preferably through some automation.
