Many IT organizations suffer from the nagging problems of Availability and Performance Management. In this presentation we will detail 10 Ways to Better Application-Centric Service Management, particularly with SAP environments.

1. SAP
Application Service
Management
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10 Ways to Enhance your Application-Centric
Availability and Performance Management

2. IT
Executives
Transport Requests
New Rollouts
Monitoring / CCMS Alerts
Access Requests
Background Jobs
Upgrades/Support Packs
SLA & Performance Reports
Trouble Tickets
IT
Managers
End-Users
The Nagging Problem of Availability &
Performance Management
SAP
Team
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3. It’s Tough to Manage the growing
demands of SAP Environment
• Technology is changing fast and knowledge management
along with resource demands are growing
• Daily repetitive and manual tasks are growing burden that
takes time away from expert resources
• Project demands to meet new business requirements run as
parallel streams and requires dedicated effort
• Company mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, regulatory
requirements may mean additional application
environments
• Outsourced IT services blur the lines of responsibilities,
deliverables and accountability
• Move to cloud and/or service oriented architecture may
introduce private, public and/or hybrid virtual layers that
require additional effort to manage, including migration and
life cycle management tools
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4. Grow Smarter with Application-Centric
Service Management & Automation
10 ways to Automate towards Smart Application Management
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(1) 360-degree view
of Application
Environment
(2) Availability and
Performance
Monitoring
(3) Root-cause
Analysis
(4) Time-
synchronized
Troubleshooting
Context
(5) Service Impact
Awareness
(6) Automated
Admin Scripts and
Jobs
(7) Self-healing
Automated
Recovery
(8) Digitized
Complex IT
Processes
(9) Synthetic
Transaction
Management
(10) Dynamic
Service Level
Management

5. (1) 360-degree view of Application Environment
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Hosts
Databases
Workflows
Security
Cloud
Storage
Middleware
Applications
Network
Services

6. 1. 360-degree view of Application
Environment
Think of your applications as part of a service
providing features and functions that together
complete business tasks or workflows
Top down application-centric view of your
technology components that make up the
services, e.g. SAP Functions/modules, mobile
services, application layer, database layer
(though with SAP HANA – these could be
combined), storage, network, security,
integration/interfaces
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7. Availability
Performance
(2) Availability and Performance Monitoring
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8. 2. Availability and Performance
Monitoring
Availability probe for as many layers as practical starting
with the app down to components such as DB, Hosts
Event management with logs collection, filtering and
analysis such as syslogs, database logs/alerts, workflow
event logs
Performance monitoring with metric collection (also
known as performance counters). Collect only what are
relevant at smart intervals, follow best-practices for the
technology stack. SAP literally has thousands of
metrics, most of which don’t significantly impact
performance or availability. Those of lesser impact, if
really needed – say for capacity planning, should be
collected in larger intervals
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9. Root-cause
Events /
Alerts
Metrics
Availability
(3) Root-cause Analysis
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Expert knowledge

10. 3. Root-cause Analysis
Availability, Events/Alerts, and Performance metric
are just data. They must be able to fit into context to
enhance root-cause analysis. Think of them
individually as puzzle pieces, but without context
they are more noise and doesn’t really help.
Service or Application-centric monitoring enhances
the ability fit data into context and thus provide
useful information of where, when and how they fit
into the bigger picture. Seeing where the alert or
metric originate in a service tree greatly helps the
contextual analysis.
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11. (4) Time-synchronized Troubleshooting Context
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Service
availability

12. 4. Time-synchronized Troubleshooting
Context
Contexts can be related or correlated if the data are
time-synchronized. If services are comprised of many
components then the data collected from those
components should be available in the same time series
Visual correlation: the human eyes and mind are
naturally the most powerful analytical tool so when
data are aligned, they can provide useful information
Statistical correlation: time series data normally form a
good basis for any number of statistical analysis such as
averages, spikes that can indicate deviation and root-
cause more easily
Benchmark & baselines: comparisons between
different periods, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, etc.
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13. (5) Service Impact Awareness
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14. 5. Service Impact Awareness
Service-centric monitoring allows the top-down as well
as bottom-up propagation of events that impact related
components
Flexible service definitions can assign relationships as
well as rules/weight how one should impact the other,
e.g. if a server is busy and unable to service requests for
10 minutes, then change its status to critical and
propagate the impact to the overall application service
as warning – the overall service may still be available
but degraded as other load balanced servers can still
service other requests.
Role-based subscription determines who should get
notified depending on what’s being impacted & severity
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15. (6) Automated Admin Scripts & Jobs
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App Jobs
OS
Scripts
DB
Scripts

16. 6. Automated Admin Scripts & Jobs
Centralize system administration scripts for systems,
databases, and applications
Cross-platforms
Manage batch execution schedules
Monitor execution logs
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17. (7) Self-healing Automated Recovery
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Monitor
threshold
Exception
detection
Notification
Policy-based
recovery action
Check execution
results
Repeat or
escalate if needed

18. 7. Self-healing Automated Recovery
Pro-active execution of house-keeping tasks for best
practices problem prevention
Monitored thresholds can invoke auto-recovery actions
using known fixes for common issues, or simply notify
the associated person to execute those actions
Corrective actions should be logged for audit purposes
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19. (8) Digitized Complex IT Processes
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20. 8. Digitized Complex IT Processes
Knowledge is power, IT processes are should be
captured in runbooks for documentation or automation
Complex environments are non-linear so workflows are
best used to capture processes and dependencies
Workflows should be repeatable, monitored and
managed down to the individual task level
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21. (9) Synthetic Transaction Management
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MaintainDeployPlan
RecordSynthetics
Analyze
&
Recommend
Monitor
&
Report
Adjust
&
Optimize
Analyze
&
Recommend
Define
SLAs
Baseline
Adjust
&
Optimize
Monitor
&
Report
Baseline
Assess

22. 9. Synthetic Transaction Management
Test critical processes on a frequent basis to ensure the
availability and performance service levels for them are
constantly monitored
When possible, simulate end-user experience from
various points of entry to the service or application
using robots or scripts that can be triggered centrally
but executed remotely
Baseline performance during different time periods got
trend-analysis and exception-based alerting
Transaction-level monitoring
Integration with Performance Load Testing
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23. (10) Dynamic Service Level Management
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Flexible
Dashboard
with
Drilldown
Service Level
Monitors
Service Level
KPIs

24. 10. Dynamic Service Level Management
Dashboards should support operational service level
monitoring and compliance
Service Level Agreement & Operational Level
Agreement should be proactively managed for
compliance
Automated and flexible report generation and delivery
Service desk integration with notifications and
interactive charts
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For More Information on How to Automate Application-centric
Service Management