By Caleb Billingsley, Performance Expert at Foulk Consulting
The Challenge with Business Process Flows
At Foulk Consulting, we frequently see clients whose business processes rely on complex SAP infrastructure. Critical workflows like order-to-cash and procure-to-pay span multiple systems. These processes can be easily interrupted by Intermediate Document (IDoc) errors, remote function call (RFC) communication failures, and delays or failures in batch jobs.
Any slowed or stalled business process—whatever the cause—ultimately results in a negative financial impact. To speed up resolutions and ensure better uptime for these vital processes, it’s essential for organizations and their IT teams to trace any SAP issues end-to-end, right down to the specific transaction, order, or invoice level.
Manual Troubleshooting is Slowing You Down
Despite the high stakes, we’ve observed that when an incident occurs, identifying the root cause and fixing the issue using existing tools like SAP Solution Manager can require a significant amount of manual effort. Resolution often involves digging through numerous SAP screens, tables, and logs. This gets even more complicated when business and IT teams aren’t in sync because systems, operational data, and business process knowledge aren’t shared.
Evolving from Monitoring to Intelligent Observability with Foulk Consulting and New Relic
As a proud partner of New Relic, we help our clients move beyond basic monitoring to achieve intelligent observability. The New Relic platform, when implemented for SAP solutions, empowers business application support teams to quickly understand the performance and health of their entire business processes. We help our clients eliminate the slow, manual notification processes and rapidly identify the root cause of performance problems or bottlenecks, whether they lie in the application or infrastructure layers.
Optimize Fiori End-User Experiences
Optimizing Fiori application response times is simpler with our expertise and the power of New Relic. We help you get automatic insights into the root causes of issues with an end-to-end trace from the SAP Fiori frontend directly to the SAP backend systems, including databases and programs. Distributed traces are available for every transaction, all without needing to install any agents in your SAP production systems.
Identify Process Bottlenecks Faster
In addition to monitoring your SAP system and application layers, we leverage New Relic to monitor key business process flows at the transaction, order, or invoice level. For example, we can help you visualize the distribution of background jobs over time to quickly identify any uneven distribution. This allows us to easily zoom in on a timeframe where spikes or anomalies occur to determine the root cause and take corrective action.
Improve Your Operational Efficiency: MTTD, MTTA, and MTTR
When we help you shift from monitoring to intelligent observability, there are three key operational metrics we can drastically reduce:
- Mean time to detect (MTTD): This is the time it takes to detect a problem. New Relic reduces this time with AI-powered proactive alerts that use dynamic baselining to automatically learn patterns, detect anomalies, and provide more accurate, early alerts. This is how we help you proactively eliminate potential interruptions.
- Mean time to acknowledge (MTTA): This is the time it takes for a team member to react to an incident. By implementing at-a-glance views and centralized dashboards of your entire SAP ecosystem, we help eliminate the manual correlation of signals and root cause analysis caused by data silos.
- Mean time to resolve (MTTR): This is the time it takes to resolve an issue once it occurs. New Relic’s visualizations combine end-to-end views and traces of multiple SAP and non-SAP systems. This allows us to correlate various signals and drill down to specific errors, significantly improving your ability to resolve incidents quickly.
Top Takeaways
- Through our partnership with New Relic, we can implement traces that don’t tax your systems, meaning less overhead and faster root cause identification.
- We can help you drill down into each browser click to correlate Ajax requests back to the actual user.
- We enable you to monitor background jobs and their underlying support structure, including app server instances.
Next Steps
Ready to see how Foulk Consulting and New Relic can help you excel with your SAP solutions? The New Relic monitoring for SAP® solutions is a powerful component of its all-in-one observability platform.
Contact us today to learn more or to schedule a demo and get started.
