By Caleb Billingsley, Performance Expert at Foulk Consulting
Monitoring SAP isn’t what it used to be. The move to S/4HANA, increased Fiori adoption, hybrid integrations, and cloud platforms like Azure and RISE have reshaped the playing field. But here’s the problem: most companies are still relying on legacy metrics and siloed dashboards. That’s not monitoring, it’s flying blind.
If your SAP landscape includes critical integrations, custom ABAP, or business-critical transactions with high concurrency, you need real observability. That’s where advanced APM platforms like New Relic and Dynatrace come in.
New Relic: Purpose-Built SAP Integration with Business Context
New Relic has stepped forward with a native SAP integration that collects telemetry directly from SAP NetWeaver. It’s one of the few platforms offering structured insight into SAP internals, and it’s designed for modern hybrid teams.
With New Relic’s SAP integration, you can:
- Monitor SAP systems alongside microservices, infrastructure, and front-end apps in one UI
- Get visibility into key SAP KPIs like dialog response time, transaction volume, job execution stats, and RFC performance
- Use New Relic Query Language (NRQL) to build custom dashboards and alerts tailored to your SAP processes
- Correlate SAP telemetry with external systems like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and third-party APIs
This matters when you’re supporting a business-critical flow like “Order to Cash” that spans SAP ECC or S/4HANA and multiple cloud services. New Relic gives your teams a unified lens without forcing you to maintain brittle custom dashboards or rely solely on ST03N.
And because it’s part of the broader New Relic One platform, you also get AIOps-driven alerting, distributed tracing, and real user monitoring for everything outside of SAP, including that growing portfolio of SAP Fiori, UI5, or BTP-based apps.
Dynatrace: AI Correlation + PowerConnect for SAP Visibility
Dynatrace doesn’t natively integrate with SAP NetWeaver out of the box, but paired with PowerConnect for SAP, it becomes a powerful observability engine.
PowerConnect extracts internal SAP telemetry (like STAD records, RFC stats, background job metrics, etc.) and streams it directly to Dynatrace in real time. Once there, Dynatrace’s Davis AI engine can automatically:
- Detect anomalies in SAP transaction response times or resource utilization
- Correlate SAP health with external dependencies like web frontends or cloud-native services
- Map out relationships across tiers (SAP to database, SAP to API gateway, SAP to cloud endpoints)
What sets Dynatrace apart is the automated topology and root cause detection. If you’re running Fiori apps and users report slowness, Dynatrace can pinpoint if it’s an OData backend issue, network latency, or database contention, without days of log sifting.
For customers running S/4HANA in Azure or using hybrid SAP and microservice architectures, this combination gives performance engineers a full-stack view that includes the SAP core, something legacy SAP tools simply can’t offer.
When Does This Matter?
If you’re asking your SAP systems to do any of the following, advanced APM isn’t optional:
- Support high-volume periods (e.g., month-end close, Black Friday, or end-of-year HR processing)
- Integrate with third-party systems where performance is shared but blame is not
- Roll out Fiori or SAP Build apps to end users with expectations of consumer-grade performance
- Modernize with SAP RISE, SAP BTP, or multi-cloud extensions
These aren’t “SAP-only” problems anymore. And they’re not solved by simply monitoring CPU and memory. You need end-to-end context. That’s what New Relic and Dynatrace each deliver in their own way.
Bottom Line
- Use New Relic when you want built-in SAP integration with the flexibility of open telemetry, unified dashboards, and powerful custom queries.
- Use Dynatrace + PowerConnect when you need AI-driven correlation, deep root cause analysis, and automated topology across cloud and SAP.
At Foulk Consulting, we help clients integrate these tools into their performance strategy, often pairing them with testing solutions like LoadRunner or Tosca. Why? Because monitoring tells you what happened, and testing tells you how it could’ve been prevented.
If your SAP monitoring feels reactive, fragmented, or invisible to the rest of IT, let’s talk. We’ll help you move from chasing alerts to anticipating impact.
