System Health is Mental Health

Less stress in SAP Basis with Observability

In Germany, almost 90 percent experience an IT outage once a week, and a third even every day. This is shown in the Observability Forecast Report 2022 by SaaS provider New Relic. Almost 80 percent of respondents would like to see more transparency through observability, because a lack of expertise or motivation is rarely the reason for the outages.

SAP's software collection in particular is often used to manage critical business areas. If something fails here, it has a serious impact on basic business processes. Navigating the SAP software jungle and keeping track of all events, logs, metrics and traces can be a challenge for IT teams. An observability solution tailored to SAP can provide relief. 

Everything in view

Observability is used in complex IT systems. It helps (hence the name) to observe and classify all the processes of the system. The more tools and services a company uses, the greater the amount of telemetry data the software generates. Analyzing this data manually takes a lot of time and effort. While monitoring helps with troubleshooting, it often only tells you when something is going wrong - spread across many different dashboards for each individual piece of software.

This is also the case at SAP: Many IT teams have to rely on individual monitoring tools for each SAP software. And often these do not work without an agent transmitting the telemetry data of the SAP software to the monitoring tool. In-house tools such as SAP Solution Manager also regularly reach their limits: Above all, they are complicated and time-consuming to set up, and their use also requires solid know-how. A lack of common dashboards also makes communication with other teams difficult.

Often, errors even have to be defined manually beforehand, because conventional monitoring cannot learn independently what is right and what is wrong. An automatic and comprehensive evaluation of all data in the context of the entire system falls by the wayside; errors, causes and solutions are difficult to find. This is where Observability provides support: An AI collects and analyzes all data from end to end. It evaluates the data, points out errors and their causes, and directly recommends a course of action. In the best case, the AI even corrects the error itself. For this purpose, all processes of the SAP stack can be clearly evaluated on a single dashboard. This saves IT teams a lot of time and stress.

Mental Health

One of the core factors of Observability is obvious: less downtime and better reliability of the SAP system. Another benefit away from operations: Observability ensures less burnout among employees. A study by SwissLife shows that mental and stress-related illnesses are the main reason for reported occupational disability in Germany. When it comes to managing SAP software, there's also the fact that nothing usually runs without it - and thus additional pressure for those responsible.

Treating an employee and then re-exposing them to the same stress that caused the illness is not sustainable. In the long term, this can lead to the dismissal or even permanent incapacity to work of urgently needed skilled employees. It is much more beneficial to reduce the stress level even before burnout and the like occur. 

An observability solution tailored to SAP takes tedious, time-consuming and concentration-intensive work and thus a lot of pressure off employees. Without agents, the corresponding software collects all telemetry data at the source, evaluates it and classifies it. An algorithm checks the processes in the system for irregularities and thus automatically detects errors, sends automated alerts and even suggests solutions. The AI has a holistic view of the SAP system at all times - a goal that would require an enormous amount of effort or a huge staff for human teams. Companies can use the knowledge and experience of their employees in a much more focused and efficient way once SAP teams are no longer tied down to extremely tedious, repetitive tasks.

Observability makes everyday work much easier - in SAP teams and for C-levels, for employees and employers. A company can view and understand its SAP system better and faster.