Obtain a Single, Comprehensive View for All Aspects of IT Operations

IT practitioners face a daunting challenge when trying to monitor and manage their networks and data centers. They need immediate insight and a holistic view of their networks to effectively manage them and orchestrate responses to incidents. But obtaining the necessary level of insight is often precluded by specialized teams (such as network, compute, and storage teams) that work in silos with their own views and sets of tools, resulting in silos of log data that make root cause analysis very challenging. 

Meanwhile, it’s not uncommon for an average-sized data center to generate over half a billion events per day. Maintaining an overview of complex data center landscapes is an ongoing challenge for IT teams that need to organize and use this growing volume of information to ensure that their virtual machines, servers, storage systems, and networks remain available, and to respond when problems arise. Companies need an effective way to consolidate logs, events, and metrics from their various networks and tools into a single view to gain efficiency in root cause analysis and to predict outages. When systems do go down, deep insights into the cause are critical to getting them back up quickly and minimizing the cost and productivity loss associated with downtime.

For large, complex IT environments that must always be on, what is needed is a holistic, high-level overview of the entire IT landscape that allows for effective oversight, organization, and action.

Achieving a Holistic View

SAP IT Operations Analytics provides IT support organizations with a holistic, real-time dashboard view that enables them to handle all aspects of operational management for their data centers and networks, including monitoring, alerting, analysis, reporting, and administration (see Figure 1). This solution, powered by the SAP HANA platform, also provides a comprehensive analytic view of syslog data gathered from a variety of sources, including websites, applications, sensors, and mobile devices. IT practitioners can then combine all this data to gain a complete, vendor-agnostic overview of their overall IT landscape. This level of insight can help IT practitioners to:

• Resolve and respond to IT incidents in real time instead of relying on historical log data
• Reduce the effort needed to analyze multiple data sets
• Predict failures before they occur — and prevent them from occurring at all

Figure 1 — The SAP IT Operations Analytics dashboard provides a holistic view of IT environments

SAP itself uses SAP IT Operations Analytics to help manage its “follow-the-sun” business and maintain the constant uptime its customers — both internal and external — depend on. SAP’s IT organization is a massive, 24/7 operation: It supports over 72,000 users in 70 countries on 52,000 mobile devices, and manages over 8,500 SAP systems and over 17,000 network devices and switches. To monitor the more than half a billion events its networks generate each day, SAP has deployed and successfully uses SAP IT Operations Analytics to obtain a unified picture of any errors in all of its technology stacks. The IT team can stream real-time data and handle large data volumes, all while continuing to allow the various parts of the business to use the existing tools that work best for them. Additionally, SAP IT Operations Analytics gives SAP’s IT organization a tool that can visualize all of this data and easily send regular reports to management.

An Efficient Approach to IT Operations Management

Gaining holistic visibility into your entire hardware and application landscape is a challenge, but SAP IT Operations Analytics makes that goal more attainable by aggregating data sources from different layers within a single view. Logs from multiple layers can be combined into one consistent, simplified data model, providing one comprehensive view of the network. These capabilities are designed to integrate the data collected by existing monitoring tools, avoiding unnecessary disruptions in specialized IT departments.

SAP IT Operations Analytics can stream events to your data center in real time from multiple data sources to perform advanced analysis. IT practitioners can use a highly customizable dashboard to view diverse streams of data, helping them anticipate possible incidents, such as spikes in energy consumption or upcoming network outages. From there, they can correlate data patterns from multiple streams to more efficiently detect incidents, find their root causes, and stop incidents before they occur.

SAP IT Operations Analytics also takes an efficient, cost-effective approach to data analysis. Some operations management solutions charge based on log file ingest, which can be expensive if your data center is consuming a lot of low value data. For example, firewalls can generate massive logs that contain few meaningful events. SAP IT Operations Analytics uses a more flexible licensing model based on SAP HANA memory. IT practitioners can discard less relevant data and only pay for what is retained for use. And to streamline things further, they can keep just the relevant attributes for analysis. This approach encourages adoption throughout the organization, helping to give a truly comprehensive overview of systems and networks.

Real-Time Insights Throughout the IT Landscape

The modern large enterprise, with its massive amounts of data and its expansive, interconnected networks, requires an IT management system that provides accurate, real-time insights into every corner of the IT landscape. SAP IT Operations Analytics is a solution that can help provide that level of insight. It is designed to create comprehensive pictures of complex enterprise environments, enabling organizations to prevent incidents and fix issues that would otherwise cause damaging downtime. To learn more, visit www.sap.com/itoa.