Yet another SAP monitoring tool?

Azure-native SAP monitoring is on the horizon! 

After 18 months of development, Microsoft is ready to announce Public Preview of our new Azure-native monitoring product for SAP workloads Azure Monitor for SAP Solutions, with lots of love for HANA customers. But why did Microsoft even bother to throw yet another monitoring tool on the market, given the abundance of SAP's own and third-party solutions?
In this first post, I want to share my perspective on why building Azure-native SAP monitoring makes sense and how Azure customers can benefit from it. 

Different tools for different purposes

Let me first address the elephant in the room and say that the intention is not to compete with SAP on monitoring, nor to "steal" customers from Solution Manager. However, I think we can agree that companies running SAP environments in the cloud are facing multiple operational challenges when relying on legacy monitoring tools that were built many years (or decades) ago under different premises.

Looking specifically at HANA as SAP's database and de-facto only technology platform for all its current major products, the following can be said as more and more customers move to the cloud:

• Complex installation
  Due to their complexity, Solution Manager and HANA Cockpit are not exactly straightforward to install and usually require advanced knowledge of the underlying stack.
• Limited access for cloud admins
  In evolving enterprise IT landscapes, there are new roles outside of the classic SAP Basis or database admin and not everyone who would benefit from SAP monitoring tools has access to them.
• Limited insights from bare-metal servers
  In addition, customers running HANA workloads on Azure's bare-metal offering (HANA Large Instances), often have to rely on SAP-native or third-party monitoring tools, since Azure - until now - provides very little infrastructure telemetry.
• Limited integration outside of SAP
  SAP's own HANA monitoring tools like Studio or Cockpit have very limited options for integration with modern ticketing systems (going broader, Solution Manager is slowly picking up this trend, though), or even just export telemetry off the SAP stack.

Hi, we are Azure Monitor for SAP Solutions

With the above challenges in mind, our goal was to build an native SAP monitoring tool, that:

• requires no expert knowledge and can be set up in 5 minutes;
• can be accessed as a first-party service in Azure Portal;
• provides valuable telemetry for SAP landscapes regardless of the underlying Azure infrastructure (VM or bare-metal);
• integrates with Azure's existing monitoring framework, allowing for easy integration with existing ITSM and dashboard tools.

In addition, we strive for maximum transparency and are building our product "in the open:" Just recently, Abhinaba Basu from our team shared details on the underlying architecture and our payload source code is publicly available on GitHub.

SAP HANA was just the beginning

I will say that building this product has been very gratifying and while our initial focus was to provide basic infrastructure monitoring for SAP HANA on Azure customers, we have already gone way beyond that. In our Public Preview release on July 15, 2020, we are offering the below telemetry "out-of-the-box"; thanks to a flexible payload framework, we will be able to easily add further content in the future and satisfy our customers' monitoring requirements.

SAP HANA Monitoring, directly in Azure! 

• SAP HANA
• Utilization
• Backup
• Replication (HSR)

• Microsoft SQL Server
  
• Current load
• Top statements/tables
• AlwaysOn

• High-availability cluster (Pacemaker)
• Overall cluster health
• Node status
• Resource status

If you have migrated (or are in the process of migrating) your SAP landscapes to the cloud, let me know which operational challenges - if any - you are facing related to monitoring! Also, what kind of scenarios would you like to see covered by our tool?