SAP Cloud ALM Operations overview
SAP Cloud ALM
SAP Cloud ALM is the new Application Lifecycle Management tool from SAP. More and more customer systems are moving to the cloud. So it only makes sense to offer also a ALM tool for cloud-centric customers. SAP Cloud ALM runs on SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), every customer will have it’s own instance. It’s free for all customers who have a cloud service subscription.
Being a cloud solution, it has very quick development cycle, SAP delivers new features and improvements regularly (weekly updates) and over the 2 years it has been available, it has come a long way. All these updates have shaped the tool, that once had a short feature list, to a effective tool, that everyone should look into and consider. And it’s not only cloud solutions that are supported, but also hybrid landscapes and on-prem systems like S/4HANA.
SAP Cloud ALM consists of two parts, Implementations and Operations. Will focus on Operations here.
Operations
Overall
SAP Cloud ALM for Operations is a monitoring tool with similar features as the big brother SAP Solution Manager. But it puts a heavy focus on the business viewpoint of our SAP systems. It covers monitoring of business processes, integrations, exceptions, applications and users, with alerting and notifications. All the monitoring applications share a common look-and-feel with embedded analytical views for easier user experience. Collected metrics can trigger alerts. Based on these alerts and events, automatic corrective actions can be triggered with SAP automation solutions. External APIs can also be consumed, for example ServiceNow integration for Incident Management. The embedded analytical tools ebable quick root cause analysis.
Like mentioned, it has different monitoring applications, lets have a closer look.
Business Process Monitoring
Business Process Monitoring (BPMon) monitors the Business processes health and detects anomalies during process execution. Enables to directly identify process disruptions and react to them based on pre-defined key performance indicators (KPIs).
KPIs for E2E processes are divided into 4 categories:
- Lead to Cash
- Source to Pay
- Design to Operate
- Recruit to Retire (for SuccessFactors)
Integration and Exception Monitoring
Integration Monitoring collects detailed status overview info per business system on the incoming/outgoing messages for different interfaces with drill down to identify problems, providing so E2E monitoring for message flows across cloud services and systems. Messages can also be tracked by different context attributes. This enables you to ensure reliable data exchange between different systems.
Supported are for example AIF messages (SAP Application Interface Framework), iDocs, Web Service Messages, different Ariba Messages etc.
Exception Monitoring collects system errors like ABAP Runtime errors and System Log errors. Giving a quick overview of the problems in the systems.
Job and Automation Monitoring
Job and Automation Monitoring collects individual job execution data and evaluates the executions against historical data with a rating. It Checks Execution status, application status, start delay and runtime, providing the current status of the jobs and enabling the root cause analysis to find problems and detect anomalies. Supported are Application Jobs, ABAP jobs, BW process Chains and SAP Intelligent Robotic Process automation jobs.
It provides the possibility to drill down to every job execution instance with detailed step information and direct navigation to the executing service. Alerting can be configured for notifications for disruptions and exceptions.
Real User Monitoring
Real User Monitoring collects user interactions (usage for thru executions, performance thru response time) and the relevant server requests. Request executions are rated based on historical values. It helped IT and Business to understand how often applications are executed and what is the response times for the end-users. For front-end SAPUI5/Fiori, SAP Web Dynpro, SAPGUI for HTML (Web GUI) data is collected. For back-end HTTP(S), RFC(S), Dialog, Web Services.
Collected data is represented in different visual views for analysis and request breakdown, enabling the root cause identification for performance problems.
Health Monitoring
Health Monitoring provides technical metrics for cloud services and systems. Based on these collected data, a overall health of the monitored object is calculated. Different service types have different predefined metrics. It’s a light-weights system monitoring tool for ABAP systems, covering the most important features like response time, dumps, memory, host data etc.
Supported Solutions
Every monitoring use case has its own supported solutions:
Business Process Monitoring
SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud Edition
SAP S/4HANA Private Cloud Edition
SAP S/4HANA On-Premise Edition
SAP Business Suite
SAP SuccessFactors
Integration and Exception Monitoring
SAP S/4HANA Cloud
SAP S/4HANA (on-prem & private cloud)
SAP Business Suite
SAP NetWeaver Application Server for ABAP (higher than 7.40)
SAP SuccessFactors & SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll
SAP Sales & Service Cloud
SAP Mobile Services
SAP Master Data Integration
SAP Marketing Cloud
SAP Intelligent Asset Management
SAP Integration Suite – Cloud Integration
SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain
SAP Fieldglass
SAP Field Service Management
SAP Event Mesh
SAP Customer Order foundation
SAP Concur
SAP Business Technology Platform – Neo & ABAP Environment
SAP Ariba – Sourcing, Procurement, Network & Cloud Integration Gateway
Job and Automation Monitoring
SAP S/4HANA Cloud
SAP S/4HANA (on-prem & private cloud)
SAP Business Suite
SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll
SAP Marketing Cloud
SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation
SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain
SAP Business Technology Platform ABAP Environment
Real User Monitoring
SAP S/4HANA Cloud
SAP S/4HANA (on-prem & private cloud)
SAP Business Suite
SAP Business Technology Platform ABAP Environment
SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain
SAP Marketing Cloud
Health Monitoring
SAP S/4HANA Cloud
SAP S/4HANA (on-prem & private cloud)
SAP Business Suite
SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation
SAP Integration Suite – Cloud Integration
SAP Cloud ALM
SAP Business Technology Platform – Neo & ABAP Environment
If you need any more information, a demo or help setting SAP Cloud ALM up, please contact us and we are happy to help you start your Cloud journey.
