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.
Most SAP systems today are heavily dependent on critical background jobs to power the business processes. As much as there are focus on the latest UX/UI and user interactions, the facts are more than 60% of SAP business suite systems are consumed by background processing. So much so that some of IT-Conductor's customers want to focus our monitoring primarily on background processing and related alerts and performance.
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.
SAP operations is normally managed by:
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.
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.
