SAP availability has traditionally been measured based solely on whether the application is up and running, commonly referred to as uptime or system availability. While this metric is important, it doesn’t fully capture the user experience or the impact on business outcomes. As businesses become more reliant on SAP and other enterprise applications, measuring availability only in terms of system uptime may not be sufficient to understand the actual impact on end-users and the overall business.
To bridge the gap between how IT and the business measure SAP experience, it is essential to consider additional metrics that focus on the user experience and business outcomes.
New service level agreements (SLAs) are now emerging to measure SAP by adding performance benchmarks like experience level agreements (XLAs), as well as network and dialog response times. All the new performance measurements are geared towards whether the company is meeting its planned business outcomes in which SAP is serving as the company’s key application within their digital core.
The combination of traditional uptime metrics and these new performance benchmarks allows for a more holistic assessment of SAP’s effectiveness and its contribution to the company’s success. It also encourages IT and business stakeholders to work collaboratively to optimize SAP’s performance, thus enhancing the overall value derived from this critical application.
Cisco and Accenture have invested in bringing these new performance benchmarks to the forefront through a solution called SAP Operational Intelligence, which combines the Cisco Full Stack Observability (FSO) suite—including AppDynamics and ThousandEyes—along with Accenture’s SAP industry expertise and accelerators. What do customers gain from SAP Operational Intelligence?
Observability across their SAP (and non-SAP) environments, providing visibility and performance insights into the applications and infrastructure running their organizations’ most mission critical business processes.
Real-time diagnostics across SAP and non-SAP components, providing support teams with the insights needed to resolve issues before they impact business processes and end users.
SAP performance aligned with business outcomes, correlating how the SAP application and transaction performance impact each step in their mission-critical business processes through the use of a weighted business scorecard. Such business outcome visibility enables the business, IT, and the network teams a single focus into how application performance is directly impacting their business metrics and revenue streams.
Visibility to siloed application teams
Typically, when SAP application performance issues occur, the application, infrastructure, interface, and networking teams have limited ability to diagnose the root cause based on the toolset available to them. Mean time to repair (MTTR) increases when teams lack the ability to directly collaborate with other teams through a unified platform. Consequently, small incidents become large issues because siloed teams work independently.
SAP Operational Intelligence provides a centralized platform, enabling teams to gain visibility and better understand the overall health of the SAP system. Intelligent dashboards and a single monitoring platform facilitate collaboration and communication between teams, allowing them to work together efficiently to address issues and resolve them proactively.
With SAP Operational Intelligence serving as the central hub for monitoring and diagnostics, the barriers created by siloed teams are broken down. This unified approach fosters quicker incident resolution, reduces MTTR, and prevents minor problems from escalating into larger disruptions.
Visibility to SAP Basis administrators
Start with the SAP observability command center
How to get started gaining SAP Operational Intelligence? Begin by talking to Cisco and Accenture about putting an SAP observability command center in place. Three typical use cases often drive this decision:
SAP Management: Configure the AppDynamics cognitive engine, gaining analytics and insights to reduce outages, decrease MTTR, and eliminate false alerts.
Business Observability: Add process monitoring and key performance indicator (KPI) reporting. Use AppDynamics to provide business process journeys and KPIs supporting multiple personas.
End User Experience Monitoring: Use the Digital Experience management capabilities of AppDynamics coupled with ThousandEyes Synthetics and automated scripting to identify network performance challenges and proactively improve end user experience.
Of course, these use cases represent only the beginning. The end goal is to achieve observability across all applications, available through the Cisco and Accenture partnership.
By embarking on this transformative path and implementing SAP Operational Intelligence, you will optimize SAP performance, align it with your business goals, and pave the way for successful digital transformation across your organization.
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