What is Operational Transparency?

What does operational transparency mean? Why is it important to have transparency for your company’s operations and performance? Today, operational transparency is integral to your organization’s health and overall company well-being. 

What is Operational Transparency?

SAP environments continue to become more and more complex.  With hybrid environments, the addition of SaaS solutions and the rapid growth of third party software use, being aware of the health of these environments is also becoming more complex. SAP monitoring, starting at the heart of the SAP system and monitoring through to all other components from a single source becomes critical. This is modern day SAP Operational Transparency.

Dashboards

What if you had a single pane of glass view, and could understand immediately the health of the entire SAP landscape, including integration points and health of the underlying hybrid environment? Any single point of failure could have major downstream negative impacts to the organization. But every SAP environment is unique, no two are alike. Complete flexibility with the ability to easily customize dashboards gives engineers, managers and upper management, and even customers, operational transparency, meaning the visibility into the metrics that are critical for their day to day operations, whether it’s via web browser or mobile app.

Business Services

As these complex environments continue to become more and more of a labyrinth of business service connections and endpoints through third party systems (think banks, vendors, etc..), hybrid environments (on-premise, public cloud, SaaS) and even bolt-on software within your SAP landscape, the ability to easily identify where an issue resides becomes cumbersome. Having the ability to map out all of these underlying technical components that make an overarching business process tick, allows your team to immediately understand the digital or technical health of a process. Furthermore, importing these business services into dashboards allows teams to share these technical process maps with business units and functional teams, giving everyone the warm-and-fuzzy experience that the technology stack is working as it should.

Notification Escalations

Notifying your teams based on a monitoring check is crucial to ensuring everyone is aware of issues. Unfortunately it has become a frustration point with teams often being bombarded with emails, constantly being woken up with false positive text messages, and eventually escalated into a situation where all notifications are muted - a dangerous place to be. By being able to combine checks into groups, specific scenarios can be identified by technical relevance and distributed to the correct teams. In parallel, notification escalations can be set in place so full teams, employees and managers, are not receiving notifications for every single item. If a single, or group, of notifications are not being addressed, having an escalation path safeguards the fact that the issue or problem can be addressed immediately, without hesitation. Combining all of these notification practices, and ironing out your notification process with automation, ensures the correct people are receiving the correct notification at the correct time.  

Reporting

Reviewing historical health data of a system gives organizations the ability to look for and learn trends, have an understanding of growing issues and track problems for audit purposes. It’s important to understand that monitoring checks used for notifications should be separated from monitoring data used for reporting purposes. A report of all notification data could be difficult to comb through while concise reporting data will provide the correct customized metrics the audience requires. This could be handled through an interactive report where the audience can peruse historical data at will, or through a customized report that is automatically sent via email. Either way, the automation of these reports gives the engineers the time back that they would have spent collecting, sorting and displaying this data back so they can focus on business critical issues and proactive project work.

In today’s world, being blind to the collective SAP ecosystem health data could be detrimental to the organization. Implementing a monitoring software like Avantra, will supply a one-stop-shop to critical SAP data, integration endpoints, hybrid monitoring and SaaS solution visibility in a customized environment guarantees an understanding of the entire environment. Having the ability to take this data and customize dashboards, business services, notification escalations or reports automatically give a business the insights they need to make informed decisions.