SAP & Splunk 101 (September 2019)
This is a guest Splunk Blog post originally contributed by Brant Hubbard, CEO & Founder, RHONDOS in late September 2019.
Yesterday, Splunk & SAP announced a partnership focused on enabling The Intelligent Enterprise, “a strategy that allows you to transform data into action across all lines of business—driving process automation and innovation, unlocking new areas of growth, and delivering exceptional experiences.”
After working with over a hundred Fortune 500 Enterprises looking to better monitor their SAP environments with Splunk, the RHONDOS team couldn’t be more excited about Splunk and SAP’s expanded relationship and the value it will bring to both customers and the partner ecosystem.
For years, organizations “in the know” have saved millions of dollars every month by observing and understanding the performance of their SAP applications and infrastructure.
Their secret?
Monitoring SAP environments using a ready-to-roll application called PowerConnect for SAP.
The business-critical data generated by SAP systems is possibly the most important and valuable data generated across an enterprise. Using PowerConnect to access SAP information and combining it with real-time cloud and infrastructure data in Splunk unlocks unprecedented visibility and a strong competitive advantage. Splunk and PowerConnect are ideal complements to The Intelligent Enterprise, with the proven ability to help organizations reduce P1 issues as much as 30%, slash MTTR by 70%, and achieve compliance with complex, industry-specific security standards.
The Value of Splunk for SAP
As a mission-critical ERP system, SAP has strict retention policies to keep production environments operating efficiently and a standardized transaction schema for maximum supportability across more than 50,000 of the world’s premier companies. As a result, the flexibility of traditional reporting options for critical security and performance-oriented data is limited, making Splunk’s schema-on-read capabilities a true game-changer for the SAP ecosystem.
We’ve witnessed SAP teams discover insights they didn’t even know existed. Within just a day or two of viewing data in Splunk, our customers have seen a user with dangerously elevated permissions, a configuration issue causing those pesky middleware errors that have been popping up for six months, and even simple issues such as abnormally high numbers of users with access to a development system.
The visibility Splunk provides can have substantial implications for the business.
For example, our team worked with one Fortune 100 manufacturer that narrowly avoided an SAP P1 outage due to a poorly written SQL statement. Splunk’s ability to correlate data from work processes at the application layer with table locks and the associated custom SQL statements at the database layer in real time saved the customer from a disastrous outage. 40 minutes prior to the first red flag, the operations team was alerted and able to quickly identify and fix the issue before it escalated to a full-blown outage — a capability not offered with their traditional monitoring system.
A single outage can cost enterprise businesses over $200,000 an hour. Eliminating SAP P1 events is a top priority from end-users all the way up to the CEO.
Accelerate Time to Value with PowerConnect for Splunk & SAP
PowerConnect for SAP & Splunk is the only solution on the market to have SAP-certified integration with both SAP S/4HANA and SAP NetWeaver for sending ANY decrypted SAP dataset and transaction type (structured or unstructured!) to Splunk.
With over 50 predefined dashboards available in the PowerConnect App, SAP teams are able to investigate security, performance, and business data in real time in ways never before possible. Custom extractors and dashboards can be quickly created to let organizations do IT their way. Ultimately, this speeds up investigations, pinpoints root causes faster, cuts down mean time to resolution, and simplifies the creation of useful alerts for critical SAP events.
PowerConnect for Splunk & SAP is a proven solution that has been extensively implemented and validated across the most complex and demanding SAP environments in the world. We know because RHONDOS is the preferred distributor for PowerConnect in North America, providing 24/7 support on deployments and on-demand services for continued implementation support.
Learn More
SAP Daily Checklist: SAP Teams often spend hours manually checking and monitoring various siloed data sets to ensure they meet their SLAs to the business. With the new System Overview Dashboard that aggregates these datasets to a single screen, teams can refocus their energy on driving new and exciting value to their business stakeholders.
SAP Interface Monitoring: With dashboards dissecting key SAP business functions like batch processing, sales orders, and interface communications, PowerConnect customers can elevate their use of Splunk from technical toolset to enterprise insight.
SAP Time Machine: This dashboard allows users to view all key performance metrics on any SAP system during different slices of time, side-by-side. Want to showcase the improvements in SAP performance on Black Friday year over year? 30 seconds and you’re DONE.
SAP Security Essentials: With over 20 audit reports included out-of-the-box and gorgeous visualizations for user activity and notable events, customers can accelerate cumbersome compliance audits and mitigate insider threats.