By – Shruti Chourasia
(SAP BASIS Consultant | Digitate)
When foreign bodies enter our human body, the first line of defense is our immune system. Similarly, an ERP solution is the immune system for the Enterprise and it is like one of the critical organs of the human body. To stay protected, we use sanitizers, immunity boosting agents and now during the current pandemic, there are face masks, social distancing and vaccinations. The ERP solution for an Enterprise also needs protection to maintain its health and for seamless Enterprise operations. Let us see why and how it can be achieved!
ERP solutions such as SAP is a common tool used in most Enterprises. This SAP system’s health is critical for businesses. Any human errors, big or small, or negligence can lead to several production losses ranging from minor glitches to major outages. To clarify this further, the following are some examples:
- Keeping data safe is an important aspect of any business. Any negligence may lead to loss of data, data corruption and so on which can have a major impact on business processes. Imagine a situation where an operating system crashes and there is a dependence on the backup database to restore the data without any loss. But due to a miss in monitoring the backup database space, knowing that it was at its peak from the past week, can lead to severe trouble in production.
- Analyzing system logs which can be system errors, warnings, locked users due to failed log-in attempts by known users, and so on are critical. A small miss on systems like utilities or billing would be considered mission critical as any outage will be disastrous and will impact the downstream billing runs and customer interactions.
- Analyzing the ABAP dumps which are run-time errors can be critical. For instance, memory or database related dumps created by some user unknowingly can affect the production system performance as well as other users.
Hence, BASIS housekeeping must be performed regularly and the procedures should be strictly adhered by the operations team. These activities usually become tedious and monotonous.
“Resolve an issue in such a way that it should never occur again” – anonymous
This is not just a quote, but an approach that every SAP Technical Consultant should adhere. In general, for a Technical Consultant, when an issue occurs they should try to find a permanent way out and ensure that it is implemented end-to-end or implemented in the all the environments wherever it may occur. To work on this approach efficiently, a Consultant must be proactive, prompt, smart, quick, and aware of the all the errors. The cost, time, resources (human and infrastructure) and the possibility of human errors can never be neglected. This is still acceptable if the issues seldom occur, but the reality is, technical teams has to put a lot of effort to keep SAP systems healthy every day.
Now, what if something can help you take care of the repetitive monotonous tasks and maintain system health by identifying the errors, fixing them and reporting them before the business starts?
Sounds interesting, right?
This is what an intelligent automation solution can do for your Enterprise to run smoothly, minimize the downtime through proactive actions and resolve the errors in the system. It not only saves cost and human efforts, but maximizes productivity and reduces execution time, thus minimizing the business impacts.
SAP ERP has various products and big landscapes which involves wide infrastructure and complex architecture. Moreover, companies invest substantially to manage their SAP landscapes. A solution like ignio AI.ERPOps’ SAP system health check capability can help address the above challenges through its intelligent automation libraries. ignio monitors SAP systems by analyzing critical SAP transaction codes. It gives a consolidated report for all the monitored transaction codes and sends the report to the users. This involves an approval procedure and self-heal actions for multiple landscapes. ignio plays an important role in centralized monitoring as it can monitor multiple landscapes simultaneously in a very short time as well as follows the security practice as per SAP’s recommendation. Furthermore, ignio uses encrypted and secured method for communication and minimizes the efforts to manage a complex landscape and keep the environment stable.
The figure shows ignio SAP system health check in a nutshell.
If an SAP Administrator monitors manually, then the user has to login to all the SAP systems and execute all the transaction codes and record them. This is very difficult due to the following challenges:
- Complex environments and a wide range of issues occurring frequently
- Manual efforts to segregate, analyze and resolve the issues
- Time consuming processes and no further way of saving logs
- Inability to eliminate human errors completely, especially when teams are overloaded with requests. Even minor errors can lead to major issues, which impacts the business.
If ignio monitors, the following are the benefits:
- 100% automated health checks for all SAP systems and instances in one go without any manual intervention
- Centralized monitoring for complex landscapes that enables a bird’s eye view for business owners and helps improving the overall visibility and transparency
- Round the clock monitoring using scheduled tickets helps the business have handy reports before start of business. The issues are hence resolved before they impact the business
- A handy consolidated report is generated by ignio automatically. This reduces the time and effort of analyzing as ignio performs in a very systematic and error-free approach
- Ability to schedule system health checks anytime. Several customers use this feature to schedule checks before start of business and thus get reports handy before they begin the day. For some critical applications, it can be scheduled hourly, twice a day, thrice a day and so on.
- With ignio Self-heal feature, resolve identified errors autonomously that too with proper approvals.
ignio AI.ERPOps captures all the system logs for critical transactions and gives the complete list of errors occurred in the system which involves alert and performance index, based on threshold and criteria. This report can be viewed in both tabular and graphical format. System health checks can be scheduled and triggered whenever required. Scheduling helps an SAP Administrator to resolve the issues proactively. Reports are customized in such a way that they are easy to understand for an end user and provides important logs which are required for analysis. ignio health check further helps organizations to keep their SAP systems stable and error-free.
For more information on ignio AI.ERPOps and its health check capability, visit https://digitate.com/ignio-ai-erpops/
