Sap ABAP - code instrumentation and business view

[y_buccellato]

Hello community,

I have observed Dynatrace integration with SAP and I have seen the most of the monitoring happening on the performance side. There is quite not a business view on what ABAP code is doing or more insight for analytics (like catching number of orders, value of orders by user session and action attribute . . . things that you can actually implement when you are making RUM).

Has anyone of you had experience in capturing more in depth details about SAP?

Has anyone tried the log monitoring path?

Thanks in advance

Thanks!

[ChadTurner]

@y_buccellato have you made any progress with this? Any tips or tricks you can share?

[y_buccellato]

Yes Chad, it is more clear to me now the complexity involved in what I was asking and what capability Dynatrace have and doesn't have.

Dynatrace approaches monitor SAP, specifically on 3 areas:

• SAP GUI > end user
• the SAP infrastructure if you install the agent in infra-mode only > infra
• SAP Hana DB > infra + extension for specific and technical metric on DB behavior

ABAP code is never ever instrumented (but truth to be told the word instrumentation is not appropriate for ABAP code) by any current implementation or technology in the Dynatrace platform.
ABAP code errors are "traced" when a crash is generated by a user working on SAP GUI [mildly interesting]. That is as far as you can go in terms of visibility.

Of course the SAP ecosystem is way more complex than this and I understand that covering this complexity implies a knowledge of how SAP is working that not every vendor have or want to spend his resources on (security, as an example, sells better).

In a simplified version of what I have encountered I can tell you that very important elements of monitoring SAP are totally missing, for example:

• Idocs monitoring
• RFC calls monitoring
• the inbound and outbound communications for RFC are missing

All these elements put together contribute to a level of visibility that is borderline between Business and Performance & Availability and give the level of observability and monitoring that a big org. want to see when troubleshooting the many existing integrations with SAP and non SAP system.

I could continue but I prefer to stop here cause the conversation would continue by mentioning platform different from Dynatrace.

On the Dynatrace side I could make an additional hypothesis that with the new Saas they could actually create something more business and event oriented to catch some missing SAP visibility but they would still lack the ability of making and end to end trace. This remain an hypothesis since I'm not an admin anymore since two month or so and cannot experiment in any way on my own.

Regards,

Yann

[kalle_lahtinen]

Thanks for the summary Yann, really good stuff! Regarding the RFC calls, I was wondering if you (or anyone else) could comment on the following:

We have instrumented a SAP JVM, which calls ABAP backend systems via RFC calls. We'd of course like to have visibility to these calls, but is that even possible since the protocol switches to RFC? Even if the calling process is Java, which is supported. I've tried creating custom services based on classes starting with "com.sap.aii.adapter.rfc", but this is all very experimental so far. Without knowing what each method really does, it's a bit of a guessing game.

edit: since my question was a bit buried in this extensions subforum, I created a new topic about it here:

https://community.dynatrace.com/t5/Open-Q-A/Trace-visibility-for-SAP-JVM-calling-ABAP-backends/m-p/2...