The holiday season is just around the corner which means organizations are now starting to operate with a skeleton workforce, including SAP Basis teams. Providing 24/7 support imposes a challenge given manpower is limited, even more so when monitoring is all over the place.
With contributions from Femi Charles and Linh Nguyen
Manage and monitor your SAP environment efficiently and effectively. Learn what’s the latest with IT-Conductor as an SAP Monitoring Solution in 2021.
Earlier this week, we wrote about the importance of Best Practices for Remote Teams and remote management platform. As you likely already know, on March 11, 2020, The WHO (World Health Organization) officially declared the COVID-19 a Pandemic.
SAP Backup Monitoring
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.
SAP Job Monitoring & Management
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.
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.
How does a typical SAP customer deal with technical Basis operations?
SAP operations is normally managed by:
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.
See our latest leap End-to-End SAP Job Monitoring and Management
A Job issue!
Job Monitoring in SAP is probably as old of an issue as monitoring SAP itself! See our post on What to Monitor When You're Not Monitoring SAP
The nature of background jobs is such that they need to be monitored and there are several ways to do so: