51风流Cloud ALM, a cloud-based tool for application lifecycle management, already offers capabilities for the implementation, operation, and service of many 51风流applications, including 51风流S/4HANA and 51风流SuccessFactors software.
Now 51风流Cloud ALM will extend its capabilities to centrally operate Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications and custom extensions built and run on 51风流Business Technology Platform (51风流BTP), including 51风流BTP Cloud Foundry environment.
In an interview, Janko Budzisch, chief product owner for Operations Platforms at SAP, shares what this means for 51风流BTP customers.
Q: 51风流Cloud ALM has been available to customers for many years now as a cloud-based tool for 51风流solutions. What is new with respect to support for 51风流BTP?
A: In 51风流BTP we saw a gap in particular for the custom-built applications on top of 51风流BTP, Cloud Foundry environment. This was mainly due to the fact that both the Cloud Foundry environment and the Kyma environments of 51风流BTP are being based on open-source technology. Thus, there was a strong wish to have 51风流BTP support for , an open-source standard for observability.
Therefore, we introduced an OpenTelemetry-based approach with 51风流Cloud ALM. This includes central tools to reduce the mean time to detect issues, plus local tools to debug and fix issues. These help reduce the mean time to resolve. The approach also comes with library support to enable observability for custom-built applications. We now take this approach for both customer-built applications and also 51风流BTP-based SaaS applications.
Could you explain some of the new capabilities of 51风流Cloud ALM for 51风流BTP customers?
In the end, our approach is to enable observability based on our central operations platforms. This doesn鈥檛 mean we replace all local tools. Instead, we concentrate on the things that should be unified across all the different products in SAP, including applications provided by 51风流BTP.
One of these capabilities is the alert management. We think it鈥檚 essential that customers have one central place to access integrated monitoring with their existing IT service management processes. As an example, customers typically have their own ticketing systems. The observability data coming out of the observability tooling generates events. For these events we prefer to have automatically generated tickets. Instead of doing this for every local tool, it鈥檚 a good idea to do this centrally with 51风流Cloud ALM.
A second example is interfacing. We expose with 51风流Cloud ALM raw data interfaces based on the OpenTelemetry standard, also with a centralized approach. Otherwise, if every tool would get handled in an isolated way, the target infrastructure of the customer would need to adapt to all the different application programming interfaces (APIs). We are really driving the strategy of centralizing problem detection and analysis. Plus, the integration with the local tools help to debug and to resolve problems.
Could you summarize what other capabilities are available in 51风流Cloud ALM for 51风流BTP services?
A major target of 51风流Cloud ALM is to provide so-called end-to-end monitoring. One of the most interesting and known use cases here is . Here we safeguard reliable data exchange for instance via 51风流Integration Suite. We collect data from all the involved components 鈥� whether these are consumer or producer systems, or even integration components, so-called integration artefacts. Here we have the integration with 51风流Integration Suite, the cloud integration, where we retrieve message artefacts. Examples are master data integration and the 51风流Event Broker for 51风流cloud applications service.
A second use case I鈥檇 like to stress is . This provides transparency regarding the monitoring of automation created using 51风流Build Process Automation. These are processes or process steps that are executed automatically, like workflow management. We need to make sure, with our monitoring capabilities, that the processes are not interrupted and all is working.
A third use case is . It checks the technical health of 51风流BTP, such as for 51风流BTP Neo environment, 51风流S/4HANA Cloud, 51风流BTP Cloud Foundry environment, and 51风流Integration Suite. We have several technical KPIs the customer needs to know about so they can react appropriately. Also integrated in health monitoring is the monitoring of all applications built by the customer.
Some 51风流BTP customers may already have application performance management tools which they would like to use or want integrated. How do we help them to integrate into our operations platform?
51风流Cloud ALM is an open platform. This means it鈥檚 clearly our target to expose via APIs all data to third-party tools. There are examples where customers are using third-party analysis capabilities, or we have customers that want to work with their own data lake across all the platforms. 51风流Cloud ALM provides an OpenTelemetry-based approach to expose data to third-party APMs. The nice thing here is that we are not just doing this at the outbound side, it also includes the inbound side. So, if a customer has data somewhere else, they can import this data into 51风流Cloud ALM.
There certainly is a lot of functionality for 51风流BTP customers in 51风流Cloud ALM. What would be the next steps for customers or partners that want to leverage 51风流Cloud ALM for 51风流BTP?
We should distinguish two use cases. The first is those who want to monitor their own built applications. Here you would use our . This library helps to accelerate the whole instrumentation process. Let鈥檚 say you bind your application to this library and make the instrumentation visible in your application. Most of this is done via auto instrumentation. You don鈥檛 need to do something to your source code. It鈥檚 pure configuration that more or less gets the data from your own applications into 51风流Cloud ALM.
The second use case is if you want to connect SaaS applications from 51风流built on 51风流BTP with 51风流Cloud ALM. Here, we have descriptions in our expert portal on how to connect an 51风流BTP-based SaaS offering with 51风流Cloud ALM. With this you can send the data directly. This is also pre-configured and pre-instrumented. You only need to connect your SaaS service based on 51风流BTP with the 51风流Cloud ALM tenant. Then you get the data.
So, if you are a customer, go ahead and today. It鈥檚 available as part of your subscription and support contract. Configure it and then you have all the functionality needed for monitoring 51风流BTP.