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SAP Output (Spool) Management

Printing from SAP is an important function of the business application.  It is a specialized area of focus due to the critical dependency of most business processes such as invoicing, bill of materials, packing slips, pay checks, etc.  We have experience with customers whose manufacturing production line literally stops when the print jobs from SAP fails.  Even with today's electronic output format such as Adobe PDF, the delivery of these documents to the recipient stops when the Adobe Document Services (ADS) fails.

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How does a typical SAP customer deal with technical Basis operations? 

SAP operations is normally managed by:

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Complex Problem

In today's enterprises, there are often very complex business processes managed by SAP ecosystem often involving transactions, batch jobs, process chains, messages, documents (iDocs, BDocs, etc.) and a myriad of inter-dependencies.  Regardless of how they are designed, failure of these activities is not a question of IF but a question of WHEN, because they depend on systems, data, business logic and sometimes just human error.

How does IT-Conductor help customers manage their business-critical processes so when failures occur, errors are monitored, responsible party notified, assist in the root-cause analysis and resolution of the issue?  We will describe our approach to SAP job monitoring and management as an example scenario which is currently used by customers to remotely manage large number of jobs, process chains, messages, and many more critical services 24x7.

Figure 1: System Refresh Process

Announcement

As of May 1 2018, we have released an updated version 1.4.1 adding S/4HANA support to the list announced in February, 2018 (v1.4) where technical configurations included: ALL Netweaver ABAP instance TYPEs (BW, ERP, HR, CRM, SRM, SCM, GTS, WEM).  It is offered as a subscription service included FREE in our monitoring, or for separate subscription.  If interested, please Submit an Inquiry or visit the SID-Refresh Solution Page for further details on cost, and user guide.

"With SID-Refresh we save a lot of time, exporting customizing settings before a SAP System database refresh, and even more, when restoring them, after the copy: the tool rebuilds the selected customizing settings in a safe way and prevents possible mistakes coming from manual changes."

Dino Dose, Team Manager @ BGP Technology

Introduction

As more sites are using system replication (SR) with feature ‘active:active read_enabled’, it it is of great benefit to perform SAP HANA monitoring not only the primary site – but also the secondary site.

This presentation covers IT-Conductor cloud-based monitoring support for HA/DR/SR feature – monitoring HANA both sites of HA/DR landscapes, and the system replication activity/status in more detail.

In prior posts, we have covered several topics on HANA HA/DR, System Replication and Dynamic Tiering, please visit these for additional background:

• SAP HANA Distributed System - Guide to Scale Out, HA and Monitor HANA
• Managing and Monitoring SAP HANA 2 Active:Active System Replication
• SAP HANA System Replication - Setup, Operations and HANA Monitoring
• SAP HANA Dynamic Tiering Test-drive

HANA Landscape

Introduction

In today's cloud computing age, one would think the IT world would ask less about why cloud but rather when and how, but the fact is many still wrestle with this fundamental shift in technology.  Public clouds used to be just alternatives to in-house infrastructure hosting, but the rise of cloud apps makes the questions around cloud more and more app-centric, such as SaaS (Software as a Service), and even Everything as a Service.

If there's a SaaS for CRM like Salesforce, a SaaS for ERP like SAP S/4HANA Cloud, a SaaS for IT Service Management (ITSM) like ServiceNow, why not a SaaS for Application Performance Management (APM)?  Well, there is!  APM as a Service (APMaaS) is the fastest growing segment inside the global APM market which already surpassed $5 Billion USD, and growing at 12% per year according to a study published August 2017 “Global Application Performance Management (APM) Market 2014-2020” by Global Industry Analysts. 

In a recent publication 2018 Application Performance Management Predictions, one of the predictions is APM is Mission-Critical "Application Performance Management (APM) tools help organizations to scrupulously monitor and create applications that ensure desired performance and accessibility. APM will continue to add business value for enterprises in 2018, as it will help diagnose the complex issues and lead to an improvement in application performance and customer experience. APM will also play a crucial role in ensuring that applications continue to sustain and perform even in a virtual scenario that is prone to cyber-attacks and risks."

Now that we established that IT Management realized APM is critical, let's look at why APMaaS is gaining growth and traction among enterprises.  We surveyed some of our large customers for top reasons they went with a Cloud-based APM solution and here are a summary of the findings.

 

 

We Found an Easier Way than the Easiest

Last year we wrote about The Easiest Migration to SAP on AWS, now we hate to say it, but we were wrong!  After 17 years of doing SAP Migrations, now we found an EASIER way and we can go from any platform to any cloud and vice-versa!  Why not? Even SAP is moving its own systems to a public cloud.

IT-Conductor is about IT Process Automation, so we get excited about automation technologies.  SAP OS DB Migration has always been a pain, and will probably be as long as customers run business critical applications on it and have complex infrastructures.  Since the early 2000's we have worked very complex migrations for SAP, SUN, IBM, and many large global customers and just when the tools and process get easier there comes new challenges of going to the cloud.  There are so many cloud platforms today including SAP, AWS, VMware, Azure, GCP, IBM Softlayer, CenturyLink, and many more that supports SAP. The question becomes how do we standardize the way we migrate there in an automated fashion, without having to deal with all the technical hurdles of each cloud, as well as have options to go back if we don't like the new platform.  We'll admit, we're agnostic, we want solutions to work with everything, Any-to-Any!

Introduction

Traditionally, most Enterprise Monitoring Teams (EMT) took the top down approach of consolidating company wide monitoring in as few central platforms as possible.  The EMT sometimes often referred to as the NOC (Network Operations Center) focused primarily in the availability monitoring of network and infrastructures.  Application teams were mostly expected to monitor their own applications, being the subject matter expert (SME), and only relied on the EMT for infrastructure monitoring.  However with the rise of Apps (everything from back-office to customer facing eCommerce) coupled with multi-tier and multi-vendor environments extending to virtualization and cloud frameworks, the lines have blurred between Apps and Infrastructure.  SAP customers are in the thick of this change.  EMTs need to evolve to meet the new demands of enterprise apps in the "Age of agile" as referred to in a 2017 BigPanda annual State of Monitoring report.  While SAP teams are focused on delivering IT business values to internal and external customers, they continue to look for opportunities to offload application monitoring to EMTs.  EMTs risk losing the battle to monitor their critical IT operations when they don't equip themselves with the ability to monitor SAP effectively today and for the future.