oXya’s 5 Best Practices to Monitor your SAP Applications

Monitoring business-critical applications, like SAP, is precision work that requires constant vigilance. These applications are at the heart of a company’s business processes and require constant attention to ensure they’re working properly.

At oXya, we combine our expertise and experience with adapted tools to always maintain your systems in operational condition. Our approach is based on SAP Basis technical administration and our ITSM Cockpit tool. This tool is our main portal, containing the whole inventory of the information systems of our clients covered by oXya Managed Services. It also allows us to carry out technical system monitoring on several levels.

In this article, we’ll go over the five essential best practices that we have adopted to ensure your SAP applications are monitored efficiently and proactively.

Best Practice #1 – Having a Great CMDB

The CMBD (Configuration Management Database) is a centralized inventory that stores detailed information about the servers under oXya’s management. Before you can even start thinking about system monitoring, it’s important to have a comprehensive CMDB and to know your SAP landscape well. The main objective behind this approach is to avoid blind spots with systems that have not been indexed. Otherwise, it would be a little like driving with side mirrors that have not been properly adjusted!

The other difficulty lies in keeping the CMDB updated. ITSM Cockpit runs regular tasks to update the inventory, whether with disks, resources (RAM/CPU) or the product version that the company has.

At oXya, we have implemented a control matrix to ensure – in an automated way – that our CMDB in ITSM Cockpit is exhaustive. Moreover, we regularly organize meetings with our clients to validate the parameters of their critical applications.

Best Practice #2 – Implementing a Technical Monitoring Solution on the 3 Layers

Monitoring SAP systems require monitoring three layers (or tiers):

1. Operating system (OS)
2. Database (DB)
3. SAP application

A SAP system cannot operate by itself; it relies on an extensive infrastructure. At oXya, we are well aware of this, and that’s why we deployed a tool that covers all three layers in an integrated way. In fact, ITSM Cockpit offers wide-ranging monitoring capabilities.

Since each layer is scrutinized by the monitoring solution, this allows us to quickly identify the source of a failure and detect the weak signals that may reveal potential problems.

Best Practice #3 – Defining Controls with Relevant Thresholds

Defining alert thresholds properly is essential to efficiently identify potential problems without bothering clients unnecessarily. You must find the proper balance between thresholds that are too low – which would generate noise, or what’s known as alert fatigue or spam – and thresholds that are too high – which, conversely, would create a risk that critical situations may slip under the radar.

Yet, there’s no single, right approach, since each client is different. That’s what makes these configurations complex. At oXya, we count on a close collaboration with our client and our administration and technical coordination teams to identify the needs and implement the right thresholds.

In case the client doesn’t have enough information, our experience allows us to establish a reference base and to adjust based on feedback and changing needs. By maintaining regular communication, we ensure that our alert thresholds remain efficient and relevant.

Best Practice #4 – Implementing Appropriate Escalation

When an alert is generated, it’s important to be able to determine if it should be escalated, and if that’s the case, which type of escalation should be implemented.

When an alert is generated, it’s verified first by our monitoring team to confirm whether it’s relevant or not. If the alert is real, an internal escalation process is triggered with the service delivery team responsible for the client, so as to handle the incident.

Although most cases are managed internally (incidents categorized P4 or P3), we escalate directly to the client in more critical situations (incidents categorized P2 or P1 having a direct impact on system availability).

What’s considered critical can vary from one client to the next. Our team takes into account the intrinsic differences between industry sectors to react in the most appropriate way.

Best Practice #5 – Ensure Sound Governance of Monitoring Processes

Governance means ensuring that throughout the entire duration of the contract the relevant controls are in place. In fact, the client’s needs can change depending on new deployments. Therefore, we must reflect these changes in the monitoring strategy (the watchful eye) every time.

Agility and flexibility are at the heart of our governance approach. Our administrators can request control extracts and do regular reviews with our clients regarding the services, to ensure the services remain relevant.

In addition, we ensure that no inactive controls have been forgotten. Tickets are automatically created if such a situation were to occur.

Implementing a monitoring strategy is at the heart of oXya’s know-how. Our best practices, developed and fine-tuned throughout our various commitments with our clients, have given us a 360-degree view of your business-critical applications. This is the key to our capacity to offer proactive services! Discover how oXya can help you optimize the monitoring of your critical applications and contact us here.