![\"Microsoft](\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/10\/ms-digital-technical-stories-300x112.png\")
At Microsoft, our Microsoft Digital Employee Experience (MDEE) team is using Microsoft Azure telemetry tools to get key insights on our\u00a0business processes that flow through our SAP instance, one of the largest in the world. Our new platform provides our leadership with a comprehensive view of our business-process health and allows our engineering teams to create a more robust and efficient SAP environment.<\/p>\n
Like many enterprises, we use SAP\u2014the global enterprise resource planning (ERP) software solution\u2014to run our various business operations. Our SAP environment is critical to our business\u00a0performance,\u00a0and we integrate it into most of our business processes. SAP offers functionality for enterprise services at Microsoft, such as human resources, finance, supply-chain management, and commerce. We use a wide variety of SAP applications, including:<\/p>\n
Since 2018,\u00a0<\/strong>Microsoft\u2019s instance of SAP\u00a0is 100 percent migrated to Microsoft Azure.\u00a0This project entailed\u00a0moving all SAP assets to more than 800 Azure virtual machines and numerous cloud services.<\/p>\n We approached the migration by using both vertical and horizontal strategies.<\/p>\n From a horizontal standpoint, we migrated systems in our SAP environment that were low risk\u2014training systems, sandbox environments, and other systems that weren\u2019t critical to our business function. We also looked at vertical stacks, taking entire parts of our SAP landscape and migrating them as a unified solution.<\/p>\n We gained experience with both migration\u00a0scenarios, and\u00a0we learned valuable lessons in the early migration stages that helped us smoothly transition critical systems later in the migration process.<\/p>\n [Unpack how we\u2019re optimizing SAP for Microsoft Azure<\/a>. | Discover how we\u2019re protecting Microsoft\u2019s SAP workload with Microsoft Sentinel<\/a>. | Explore how we\u2019re unlocking Microsoft\u2019s SAP telemetry with Microsoft Azure<\/a>.]<\/em><\/p>\n At Microsoft, we develop and host all new SAP infrastructure and systems on Microsoft Azure. We\u2019re using Azure\u2013based cloud infrastructure and SAP\u2013native software as a service (SaaS) solutions to increase our architecture\u2019s efficiency and to grow our environment with our business. The following graphic represents our SAP landscape on Azure.<\/p>\n SAP on Microsoft Azure provides several benefits to our business, many of which have resulted in significant transformation for our company. Some of the most important benefits include:<\/p>\n As we examined our SAP environment on Microsoft Azure, we found several key areas where we could improve our monitoring and reporting experience:<\/p>\n Our SAP on Microsoft Azure environment was like a black box to many of our business-process owners, and we knew that we could leverage Azure and SAP capabilities to improve the situation. We decided to create a more holistic monitoring solution for our SAP environment in Azure and the business processes that defined Microsoft operations.<\/p>\n The distributed nature of our business process environment led us to examine a broader solution\u2014one that would provide comprehensive telemetry and monitoring for our SAP landscape and any other business processes that constituted the end-to-end business landscape at Microsoft. The following goals drove our implementation:<\/p>\n Integrate comprehensive telemetry into our monitoring.<\/p>\n We adopted a business-driven approach to building our monitoring solution. This approach examines systems from the end-user perspective, and in this instance, the personas represented three primary business groups: business users, executives, and engineering teams. Using the synthetic method, we planned to build our monitoring results around what these personas wanted and needed to observe within SAP and the end-to-end business process, including:<\/p>\n The MDEE team\u00a0developed a telemetry platform in Microsoft Azure that we call the Unified Telemetry Platform (UTP). UTP is a modern, scalable, dependable, and cost-effective telemetry platform that\u2019s used in several different business-process monitoring scenarios in Microsoft, including our SAP\u2013related business processes.<\/p>\n UTP is built to enable service maturity and business-process monitoring across\u00a0MDEE.\u00a0It provides a common telemetry taxonomy and integration with core Microsoft data-monitoring services. UTP enables compliance with and maintenance of business standards for data integrity and privacy. While UTP is the implementation we chose, there are numerous ways to enable telemetry on Microsoft Azure. For additional considerations,\u00a0access Best practices for monitoring cloud applications<\/a>\u202f<\/em>on the Azure documentation site.<\/p>\n To enable business-driven monitoring and a user-centric approach, UTP captures as many of the critical events within the end-to-end process landscape as possible. Embracing comprehensive telemetry in our systems meant capturing data from all available endpoints to build an understanding of how each process\u00a0flowed and which SAP components were involved. Azure Monitor and its related Azure services serve as the core for our solution.<\/p>\n Application Insights provides a Microsoft Azure\u2013based solution with which we can dig deep into our Azure\u2013hosted SAP landscape and extract all necessary telemetry data. By using Application insights, we can automatically generate alerts and support tickets when our telemetry indicates a potential error situation.<\/p>\n Infrastructure telemetry such as CPU usage, disk throughput, and other performance-related data is collected from Azure infrastructure components in the SAP environment by using Log Analytics.<\/p>\n UTP uses Microsoft Azure Data Explorer as the central repository for all telemetry data sent through Application Insights and Microsoft Azure Monitor Logs from our application and infrastructure environment. Azure Data Explorer provides enterprise big-data interactive analytics; we use the Kusto query language to connect the end-to-end transaction flow for our business processes, for both SAP process and non\u2013SAP processes.<\/p>\n UTP uses Microsoft Azure Data Lake for long-term cold-data storage. This data is taken out of the hot and warm streams and kept for reporting and archival purposes in Azure Data Lake to reduce the cost associated with storing large amounts of data in Microsoft Azure Monitor.<\/p>\n UTP uses Application Insights, Microsoft Azure Data Explorer, and Microsoft Azure Data Lake as the foundation for our telemetry data. This structure unifies our data by using a common schema and key structure that ties telemetry data from various sources together to create a complete view of business-process flow. This telemetry hub provides a central point where telemetry is collected from all points in the business-process flow\u2014including SAP and external processes\u2014and then ingested into UTP. The telemetry is then manipulated to create comprehensive business-process workflow views and reporting structures for our personas.<\/p>\n UTP created a clearly defined common schema for business-process events and metrics based on a Microsoft-wide standard. That schema contains the metadata necessary for mapping telemetry to services and into processes, and it allows for joins and correlation across all telemetry.<\/p>\n As part of the common schema for business process events, the design includes a cross-correlation vector <\/em>(XCV)<\/em> value, common to all stored telemetry and transactions. By persisting a single value for the XCV and populating this attribute for all transactions and telemetry events related to a business process, we can connect the entire process chain related to an individual business transaction as it flows through our extended ecosystem.<\/p>\n For SAP\u00a0on Microsoft Azure,\u00a0our MDEE team\u00a0focused on four specific areas for telemetry and monitoring:<\/p>\n The result was holistic telemetry and monitoring across these layers, a structure that leverages\u00a0Microsoft Power BI\u00a0as\u00a0the engine behind our reporting and dashboarding functionality.<\/p>\n Our MDEE team\u00a0created\u00a0reporting around business-driven\u00a0monitoring and\u00a0constructed standard views and dashboards that offer visibility into important areas for each of\u00a0the\u00a0key\u00a0business\u00a0personas.\u00a0Dashboards are constructed from Kusto queries, which are automatically translated in the Microsoft Power BI M formula language. For each persona, we\u2019ve enabled a different viewpoint and altitude of our business process that allows the persona to view the SAP monitoring information that\u2019s most critical to them.<\/p>\n Microsoft\u00a0previously\u00a0announced<\/a>\u202fthe launch of Microsoft Azure Monitor for SAP Solutions (AMS) in public preview\u2014an Azure-native monitoring solution for customers who run SAP workloads on Azure. With AMS, customers can view telemetry of their SAP landscapes within the Azure portal and efficiently correlate telemetry between various layers of SAP. AMS is available through Microsoft Azure Marketplace in the following regions: East US, East US 2, West US 2, West Europe,\u00a0and North Europe. AMS doesn\u2019t\u00a0require a license fee.<\/p>\n Our MDEE team worked in close collaboration with Microsoft Azure product teams to build and release SAP NetWeaver provider in Microsoft Azure Monitor for SAP solutions.<\/p>\n For more information, go to AMS quick start video<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0SAP NetWeaver monitoring-Azure Monitoring for SAP Solutions<\/a>.<\/p>\n Our telemetry platform\u00a0provides benefits across our SAP and business-process landscape.\u00a0We have\u00a0created a solution that facilitates end-to-end\u00a0SAP business-process monitoring, which in turn enables our key personas to do their jobs better.<\/p>\n Benefits for each persona include\u00a0the following:<\/p>\n The benefits of our\u00a0platform\u00a0extend across Microsoft by providing:<\/p>\n We learned several important lessons with our UTP implementation for SAP on Microsoft Azure. These lessons helped inform\u00a0our\u00a0progress of UTP development, and\u00a0they\u2019ve\u00a0given us\u00a0best\u00a0practices to leverage in future projects, including:<\/p>\n We\u2019re continuing to evaluate and improve as we discover new and more efficient ways to track our business processes in SAP. Some of our current focus areas include:<\/p>\n We\u2019re continually refining and improving business-process monitoring of SAP on Microsoft Azure. This initiative has enabled us to keep key business users informed of business-process flow, provided a complete view of business-process health to our leadership, and helped our engineering teams create a more robust and efficient SAP environment. Telemetry and business-driven monitoring have transformed the visibility that we have into our SAP on Azure environment, and our continuing journey toward deeper business insight and intelligence is making our entire business better.<\/p>\n At Microsoft, our Microsoft Digital Employee Experience (MDEE) team is using Microsoft Azure telemetry tools to get key insights on our\u00a0business processes that flow through our SAP instance, one of the largest in the world. Our new platform provides our leadership with a comprehensive view of our business-process health and allows our engineering teams to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":133,"featured_media":8989,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"_hide_featured_on_single":false,"_show_featured_caption_on_single":true,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[327,317,188],"coauthors":[646],"class_list":["post-8984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-azure-management","tag-device-health","tag-sap","program-microsoft-digital-technical-stories","m-blog-post"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nOperating as Microsoft Azure-native<\/h3>\n
![\"Detailed](\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/uploads\/prod\/2022\/11\/8658-figure1.png\")
The benefits of SAP on Microsoft Azure<\/h3>\n
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Identifying potential for improved monitoring<\/h3>\n
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Creating a\u00a0telemetry solution for SAP on Microsoft Azure<\/h2>\n
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Guiding design with business-driven monitoring and personas<\/h3>\n
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Creating end-to-end telemetry with our Unified Telemetry Platform<\/h2>\n
Capturing telemetry with Microsoft Azure Monitor<\/h3>\n
Microsoft Azure Application Insights<\/h3>\n
Microsoft Azure Log Analytics<\/h3>\n
Microsoft Azure Data Explorer<\/h3>\n
Microsoft Azure Data Lake<\/h3>\n
![\"Diagram](\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/uploads\/prod\/2022\/11\/8658-figure2.png\")
Constructing with definition using common keys and a unified platform<\/h2>\n
Common schema<\/h3>\n
Common key<\/h3>\n
Multilayer telemetry concept for SAP<\/h2>\n
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![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/uploads\/prod\/2022\/11\/8658-figure3.png\")
![\"Dashboard](\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/uploads\/prod\/2022\/11\/8658-figure4.png\")
Microsoft Azure Monitor for SAP Solutions<\/h2>\n
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![\"AMS](\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/uploads\/prod\/2022\/11\/8658-figure5.png\")
Persona benefits<\/h3>\n
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\u00a0Organization-wide benefits<\/h3>\n
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![\"Key](\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/10\/key-takeaways-300x74.png\")
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![\"Related](\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/10\/related_links-300x81.png\")
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