In a significant move to bolster application lifecycle management, SAP has expanded its SAP Cloud ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) capabilities to include comprehensive support for SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). This development aims to streamline operations and enhance the efficiency of managing both standard SAP applications and custom-built extensions on SAP BTP.
SAP Cloud ALM: A Comprehensive Tool for Modern Business Solutions
SAP Cloud ALM has long served as a cloud-based tool facilitating the implementation, operation, and servicing of various SAP applications, such as SAP S/4HANA and SAP SuccessFactors. With its latest extension, it now also covers SaaS applications and custom extensions developed on the SAP BTP Cloud Foundry environment.
Bridging the Gap with OpenTelemetry
Janko Budzisch, chief product owner for Operations Platforms at SAP, highlights a key enhancement: the integration of OpenTelemetry capabilities. This open-source standard for observability is particularly vital for managing custom-built applications on SAP BTP. By introducing OpenTelemetry-based approaches, SAP Cloud ALM now offers centralized tools for detecting and resolving issues, significantly reducing the mean time to resolution.
New Capabilities for SAP BTP Customers
- Centralized Observability: Instead of replacing local tools, SAP focuses on unifying operations across all SAP products. This approach provides a central alert management system, integrating monitoring data with existing IT service management processes and automatically generating tickets from observability data.
- Raw Data Interfaces: Exposing raw data interfaces based on the OpenTelemetry standard allows for a centralized handling of observability data, avoiding the need for customers to adapt to multiple APIs.
- End-to-End Monitoring: This feature includes integration and exception monitoring, safeguarding reliable data exchange through SAP Integration Suite. It ensures seamless data flow across various components, such as consumer or producer systems and integration artifacts.
- Job and Automation Monitoring: Transparency in monitoring automation processes created using SAP Build Process Automation ensures workflows are uninterrupted and efficient.
- Health Monitoring: Monitoring the technical health of various SAP environments, including SAP BTP Neo, SAP S/4HANA Cloud, and SAP Integration Suite, helps customers react appropriately to technical KPIs.
Integration with Third-Party Tools
For customers using third-party application performance management (APM) tools, SAP Cloud ALM offers an open platform with APIs that expose data to external systems. This includes both outbound and inbound data flows, allowing customers to integrate their data lakes and external analysis tools seamlessly with SAP Cloud ALM.
Practical Use Cases
There are two primary use cases for leveraging SAP Cloud ALM with SAP BTP:
- Monitoring Custom-Built Applications: Using an instrumentation library based on OpenTelemetry, customers can bind their applications to this library, making the instrumentation visible without altering the source code. This auto-instrumentation simplifies the process of integrating custom applications with SAP Cloud ALM.
- Connecting SaaS Applications: SAP provides detailed guides on connecting SAP BTP-based SaaS offerings with SAP Cloud ALM. This pre-configured integration allows SaaS applications to send data directly to the SAP Cloud ALM tenant, facilitating immediate monitoring and management.
Getting Started with SAP Cloud ALM
Customers interested in leveraging these new capabilities should start by obtaining their SAP Cloud ALM tenant, which is included in their subscription and support contract. By configuring this tenant, they can access the full functionality needed to monitor and manage their SAP BTP environments effectively.
Conclusion
The expansion of SAP Cloud ALM to include support for SAP BTP marks a significant enhancement in the application lifecycle management landscape. By integrating advanced observability standards and offering comprehensive monitoring capabilities, SAP Cloud ALM ensures that businesses can manage their applications more efficiently and effectively. Whether you are dealing with custom-built applications or SaaS solutions on SAP BTP, SAP Cloud ALM provides the tools necessary to maintain operational excellence and drive business success.
