{"id":6678,"date":"2021-04-29T09:14:20","date_gmt":"2021-04-29T16:14:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/?p=6678"},"modified":"2023-06-13T15:07:55","modified_gmt":"2023-06-13T22:07:55","slug":"unlocking-microsofts-sap-telemetry-with-microsoft-azure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/unlocking-microsofts-sap-telemetry-with-microsoft-azure\/","title":{"rendered":"Unlocking Microsoft\u2019s SAP telemetry with Microsoft Azure"},"content":{"rendered":"
This content has been archived, and while it was correct at time of publication, it may no longer be accurate or reflect the current situation at Microsoft.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
It\u2019s now much easier for Microsoft to extract important SAP telemetry insights from its business operations data.<\/p>\n
Microsoft relies on SAP to handle a multitude of business processes, including global invoicing and tax. Historically, limited visibility in the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform has made it difficult to identify and resolve issues.<\/p>\n
Not anymore, thanks to work by Microsoft Digital, the organization that powers, transforms, and protects Microsoft.<\/p>\n
\u201cService health is our number one priority, but SAP has been a black box for us,\u201d says Michelle Concannon, a group principal manager within Microsoft Digital\u2019s Cloud + AI group.<\/p>\n
Put bluntly, what happened in SAP stayed in SAP. The proprietary nature of an ERP system can create challenges with surfacing insights that can pinpoint issues in a processing flow.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe couldn\u2019t scale with the number of requests, so how could we get smarter?\u201d Concannon says. \u201cWe have lots of teams working on tax, and most of it runs on SAP. If taxes aren\u2019t calculating correctly or there\u2019s an issue, we need to know about that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Since the Microsoft Digital team rolled out new end-to-end SAP telemetry with Microsoft Azure, all the teams at Microsoft that use SAP to manage their work processes are benefitting from key insights being delivered to them. With newfound visibility into their workstreams, engineers can pinpoint and predict problems before they happen, transforming how they respond to SAP service health. As a result, troubleshooting has become proactive, tax and invoices are being calculated correctly more often, and important business intelligence is being captured.<\/p>\n
[Find out more about Microsoft\u2019s monitoring platform for SAP in Microsoft Azure<\/em><\/a>. <\/em><\/strong>Learn how Microsoft Digital has created a unified telemetry platform for monitoring end-to-end enterprise health<\/em><\/a>.<\/em>]<\/p>\n Working with limited visibility<\/b><\/p>\n A massive amount of data flows into Microsoft\u2019s SAP systems.<\/p>\n Business teams from across Microsoft, whether they\u2019re in North America or Brazil, India or Singapore, use SAP for back-office operations and processes.<\/p>\n One such business is Microsoft Azure Volume Licensing. Microsoft Azure, Microsoft\u2019s cloud product, uses a volume licensing approach to offer customers a flexible method of deploying services on the cloud. In turn, that allows for Enterprise Agreement subscription models and pay-as-needed models.<\/p>\n \u201cNot only is there an increasing number of customers using Azure, but each invoice also has a larger number of line items,\u201d says Maeve Tait, a software engineering manager with Microsoft Digital. \u201cWe didn\u2019t have a framework to see if the data inflow, both the volume and the nature of the invoices, coincided with lags in performance.\u201d<\/p>\n During the same time window every month, annual billing for subscriptions and impromptu overage billing creates a high volume of data to be processed by SAP.<\/p>\n This increase in Microsoft Azure revenue is good for business, but it brings with it an equally large spike in volume of anomalies signaled between Vertex, Microsoft\u2019s external tax system, and SAP.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you\u2019re running a live system and a customer goes to place an order, the order confirmation may not appear immediately, or the tax charged in the pricing may be incorrect due to a systems integration communication issue,\u201d says Louise Kennedy, a senior program manager on the SAP Tax team for volume licenses. \u201cThat\u2019ll impact the customer.\u201d<\/p>\n This breakdown goes beyond a poor experience for Microsoft\u2019s customers. It also results in wasted resources, including costly delays and lost revenue.<\/p>\n \u201cTriaging is time-consuming,\u201d Kennedy says. \u201cOvercharges and undercharges have an operational cost for the people who have to credit and re-issue invoices with correct taxation amounts, particularly when there are multiple invoices caused by the same issue.\u201d<\/p>\n Leveraging Azure fundamentally opens up the black box. It allows us to be more proactive and agile.<\/p>\n -Michelle Concannon, group principal manager, Microsoft Digital<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Without clear visibility, errors occurring within SAP only land with an engineer after someone else has been impacted and has manually escalated it in the form of a ticket. Finding the issue requires a significant effort, and at the end of the day, that\u2019s costly.<\/p>\n \u201cThe end customer would say their invoice is incorrect,\u201d Tait says. \u201cThat would come into our first-line support, who wouldn\u2019t necessarily know what was wrong. They would escalate to the second line, then eventually it may go to a generic engineering team without tax knowledge.\u201d<\/p>\n Microsoft Digital saw an opportunity to transform the entire practice into an automated process with telemetry, but to do that, they\u2019d need to take advantage of some of Microsoft\u2019s modern services.<\/p>\n \u201cLeveraging Azure fundamentally opens up the black box. It allows us to be more proactive and agile,\u201d Concannon says. \u201cWe can use the output of the work effectively to be automatically notified of whatever issues would be emerging. Ultimately, this gives us time back.\u201d<\/p>\n Taking a peek into SAP<\/strong><\/p>\n By moving SAP data onto the cloud and introducing a framework for end-to-end telemetry, Microsoft Digital could extract SAP telemetry with Microsoft Azure.<\/p>\n \u201cThe system we have for tax determination is Vertex,\u201d Tait says, referring to a third-party product that Microsoft uses to calculates tax. \u201cIf we\u2019re seeing a stress on the system because volume licensing is going up, and we know Azure billings are going up a certain percentage point every month, we can use that to forecast the stress on the service. We have the data now.\u201d<\/p>\n As transactions flow from Microsoft\u2019s front-end customer portals to SAP, the tax telemetry framework unlocks insights into the end-to-end business process flows in SAP to Vertex performance.<\/p>\n After this framework was introduced, things changed dramatically. But generating all this data wasn\u2019t immediately useful.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a blessing and a curse,\u201d Tait says. \u201cYou can pull so much data that you get dizzy trying to figure out what you\u2019re solving. To show how your service is performing, you need to narrow down what you\u2019re looking at.\u201d<\/p>\n