I’m thrilled to announce that the latest release of SAP IT Operations Analytics (SAP ITOA), version 2.1 is now generally available.
For anyone new to SAP ITOA, it’s a solution that enables holistic, true real-time, and predictive monitoring across the data center (including going direct to device or ingesting existing monitoring tools as a datasource). You can watch a 2min overview or learn more at www.sap.com/itoa.
Two significant benefits of SAP ITOA are being able to have a holistic view of the data center and proactively addressing issues and I'd like to highlight some key enhancements supporting these benefits.
The Analytics Builder
SAP ITOA gives a single pane of glass across the datacenter and all the search is done through the GUI, a search bar, or via guided SQL—without any need to learn a new query language.
Log files—while full of useful information—aren’t exactly fun or easy reading. The charts and visualizations available in SAP ITOA make it easier to identify performance trends, outliers, and areas of concern. Specific devices can be viewed through the GUI search bar or navigated to through the bucket views.
But more complex queries require a more robust way to do queries. For that we’ve enabled SQL, and we’ve taken it a step further. By using Blockly we’re enabling guided SQL in a very visually compelling way:
What is really cool about this is a savvy IT user can create complex queries that can be leveraged by visual stories.
So in this example you could link the pie chart of which AWS accounts had the highest cost and then give an average end user the ability to drill down to more detailed metrics, like the Cost Over Time or Cost per AWS Product. The drill downs are accomplished using the complex queries, but not everyone leveraging them needs to know SQL. A practical example could be an executive, they can check their dashboard and easily drill into costs without needing to access the analytics builder themselves.
My colleague, Eleanor, has done a great HANA Academy video on using the Analytics Builder:
Enhanced Alerting
While dashboards are fantastic tools to get a snapshot on the health of your IT environment, there will be situations you need to be proactively alerted to.
We’ve enhanced alerting in SAP ITOA 2.1 with enhanced alerting.
The Alerts tab gives you a quick view of alerts where you can sort based on time, severity, or any other column. You can also change alert status (like acknowledging an alert has been solved), delete alerts and more:
Within an alert definition you can easily set actions and severity levels based on defined conditions, criteria and combine different queries (for example greater than, less than and equal to different parameters). From there you can send customized email with the parameters you deem important (like impacted devices, time of event, etc).
But, even cooler, in our own (SAP) environment we are testing using the alert definitions to execute scripts. One use case is capacity planning for HANA disk space. It’s something that is simple to monitor, but if it is exceeded you can have a failure. Usually with capacity planning you plan for the worst-case scenario and then add a buffer to that. But this means you are overspending on disk space, but even worse you still run the risk of a system overage! Wouldn’t it be cool if you could elastically add and reallocate disk space? In this video we show that you can using SAP ITOA and a policy engine called Vnomic:
Learn more at www.sap.com/itoa or try SAP IT Operations Analytics yourself on the Cloud Appliance Library.
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