Improving SAP Performance with Cisco FSO

Recently, I had the opportunity to attend an in-person conference for the first time since the pandemic began at SAP Sapphire 2022. It was fantastic to see so much enthusiasm among our partners–and of course, our customers–especially around the Cisco Full Stack Observability (FSO) portfolio.

In this blog, I highlight an FSO demo I watched that was built by ATOS, which showed the end-to-end observability of SAP ECC and S4/HANA running in Microsoft Azure. ATOS provides full-stack observability of these SAP systems using the Cisco FSO portfolio comprising AppDynamics, ThousandEyes, and Intersight Workload Optimizer (IWO).

Watch my interview with Andy Fleck, head of APM at ATOS, to learn more on SAP operational excellence with AppDynamics.

Demonstrating Cisco FSO applied to SAP

In this demo, ATOS pumps transactions through both SAP systems to simulate real usage, allowing customers to see end-to-end business process performance. If any anomalies are spotted, they can be investigated by drilling all the way down to the SAP lines of code. Customers can also drill down into the non-SAP infrastructure components of the overall solution, whether they are located on-premises in the customer’s data center, off-premises (at a colocation facility, for example), or with a cloud provider.

In addition, the ATOS demo highlights ThousandEyes’ ability to determine whether there is latency in the network that may be negatively impacting application performance and user experiences. If an issue with the network is discovered, customers can click in to determine whether the problem is with the customer’s own network or with another provider’s network, such as an ISP or the cloud provider.

The ATOS demo also shows how the end-to-end business processes of SaaS applications with the SAP portfolio–such as Concur and SuccessFactors–along with non-SAP SaaS applications–such as ServiceNow and Oracle CRM–can also be monitored using the Cisco FSO portfolio.

Let’s look at some of the use cases for this type of setup.

Pre-migration SAP assessment

The first use case utilizes the Cisco FSO portfolio to assess and understand both the end-to-end application landscape supporting an existing SAP installation and the data flowing across that landscape.

By analyzing, tracking, and tracing SAP transactions, we can build a real-time business process dashboard that shows not only the overall timing of the business process but also its volumetrics. By volumetrics, I mean information like:

• How many orders and invoices is the customer processing?
• What’s the value of these orders and invoices?

The ATOS demo also showcases the ability to send alerts when any anomalies are discovered. For example, if the customer expects invoicing worth US$50,000 dollars but only $30,000 worth is discovered, the software can automatically raise that issue by submitting a ticket within ServiceNow. Then the Cisco FSO stack can be used to pinpoint where that problem is, down to the network, infrastructure, and line of code.

Post-migration SAP assessment

Once the customer has migrated their SAP landscape to the cloud, the FSO portfolio can be used to compare the SAP landscape’s performance on the cloud to its pre-migration performance. This allows the customer to obtain an accurate before-and-after cloud migration picture, empirically assessing the increase in performance (if any) achieved by migrating to the cloud.

Given the fact that every industry may be different in terms of what they want to see around application performance, ATOS offers pre-built dashboards specifically for verticals such as manufacturing.

Learn how SAP and Cisco solutions are helping to empower intelligent enterprises everywhere

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