IT-Conductor Monitors SAP on Azure for T-Systems and Zuellig Pharma with Flagship Cloud-Based APM Solution

T-Systems is one of the world's largest SAP-managed services providers headquartered in Europe. It has operations and staff of over 35,000 people in 20 countries.  In the second half of 2018, T-Systems Singapore migrated Zuellig Pharma to the world's largest SAP HANA on public cloud infrastructure running on Microsoft Azure.  T-Systems partnered with IT-Conductor on this journey to provide a cloud-first solution to application performance management (APM) due to IT-Conductor's unique monitoring as a service platform and automated agentless technology.

The T-Systems architecture team first approached the IT Conductor team with the challenge of providing continuous monitoring of over 40 applications and a complete infrastructure stack for SAP ABAP and JAVA.  These applications included ECC, CRM, SCM/APO, BW, EWM, PO/PI, GRC, SLT, BPC, SLD, TREX, Livecache, and Webdispatcher based on HANA and SUSE Linux with Pacemaker HA clustering on Azure platform.  At that point, Zuellig Pharma has been managed on-prem by T-Systems for several years using a combination of monitoring and ITSM tools such as a suite of BMC Software products, IBM Netcool, HP Service Manager, SAP CCMS, and home-grown software/scripts.  There were significant difficulties for T-Systems to re-implement those tools in the target environment on Azure, including:

• Software licensing cost on the new platform to monitor HANA
• Single solution support for the entire environment
• Deployment of SME resources since the effort would be significant and take away existing resources dedicated to operations support and the migration project
• Deployment timeline and configuration effort required for new technology like HANA, Pacemaker, and Azure

IT-Conductor promptly rose to the challenge. In a few quick online live demos, we demonstrated the full-featured monitoring capabilities of applications, databases, OS, and virtualization infrastructure. IT-Conductor highlighted the unique features and benefits of our platform using 10 Ways to Smart Automation.

To prove IT-Conductor's speed and agility, a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) plan was formalized in conjunction with T-Systems' ongoing migration project to monitor the newly migrated development systems, which represented various application architectures.  T-Systems provided a list of system connection information and a custom list of monitoring thresholds and alert requirements.  Within 2 weeks, IT-Conductor's remote service team configured the following:

1. Monitoring for SAP systems identified for SAP ECC, EWM, CRM, PI, SCM, and Solution Manager
2. Warning and critical thresholds
3. Subscriptions for alerts and notifications
4. Custom dashboards

The PoC acceptance period and knowledge transfer for usage and administration tasks took an additional 2 weeks with minimal support work from IT-Conductor. The minimal cost for the PoC would be fully credited to the deployment when T-Systems and Zuellig Pharma decided to proceed with IT-Conductor as the APM-as-a-Service (APMaaS) partner of choice.

T-Systems migration of Zuellig Pharma systems from on-prem SAP on UNIX/DB2 to Azure SAP on Linux/HANA was accomplished with SAP tool SUM DMO (Software Update Manager - Database Migration Option) and phased over several waves: Sandbox, Development, QA, Pre-production and Production.  IT-Conductor was pre-configured for each wave with best practices monitoring templates and global threshold and alert templates. Then, it was activated to monitor systems as they came online in Azure.  Each go-live was fully supported by the IT-Conductor 24x7 global team to work remotely with T-Systems and Zuellig Pharma teams.

In addition to monitoring the Availability, Performance, and Alerts for the complex SAP landscape on Azure, IT-Conductor provided further support during the pre-golive testing of performance, HA failover, and security firewall.  In post-golive, IT-Conductor works with T-Systems continuously to support the monitoring, performance analysis, root-cause analysis for critical events, customizing dashboards, automated SLA reports, capacity reports, and custom monitoring of areas like Pacemaker cluster.

In summary, T-Systems achieved immense success with the migration and management of Zuellig Pharma's very large SAP landscape to Azure, while IT-Conductor partnered with T-Systems to enable the delivery of high-quality service level and performance management using its unique cloud-based APMasS automation platform.