How time flies when you're busy innovating! It's almost 6 years since we published the guide How to Select your SAP Monitoring Tools in 2015 and followed up with a SAP Monitoring Tools Video Overview. Since then, we've seen SAP Solution Manager 7.2 released along with Focus Insights, which by the way has no meaningful enhancement in Technical Monitoring as we indicated in Waiting for Solution Manager 7.2 but does offer a HANA DB without the built-in BW for storing MAI data. SAP also added a paying license add-on for 'SAP Focused Run' option to cover such features as 'Real User Monitoring' in Public Cloud Operations. We've also seen the release of HANA 2.0 which added a separate HANA Cockpit installation (requires it's own system) just to monitor HANA 1.0 SP12 and above - we covered it in HANA 2.0 Upgrade & Operations. Furthermore, if you are an SAP ASE (Sybase) customer, the Sybase Control Center has been replaced by the ASE Cockpit and DB Control Center (DBCC) just to monitor ASE. Last but not least, SAP closed down a solution called IT Operations Analytics (ITOA), which is basically a syslog monitor without support for any SAP application operations monitoring, and seems to have disappeared since 2017.
As you can see, it's becoming more complex to monitor and manage SAP landscapes of on-premise and cloud applications. In the latest comparison matrix we've added other large vendors such as IBM Tivoli, BMC ProactiveNet, AppDynamics, Dynatrace, and Nagios XI solutions. We still try to provide:
- An objective way of assessing features and functionality, costs aside as it money complicates everything
- A central place to list the tools and what they are used for as well as their strengths & weaknesses in relation to SAP performance and SAP HANA monitoring
- A matrix to assign merit score and weight to each criteria that would help in tools and/or vendor selection