Whitepaper: BI Monitoring in Technical Monitoring workcenter of SAP Solution Manager

https://archive.sap.com/documents/docs/DOC-12268

Title:

PAPER REVIEW

This topic is very important for MIS as BW is the reference data warehouse for SAP installations.

Having data available for reporting accordingly with the service level agreements makes monitoring a mandatory activity.

Monitoring is not limited to the observation of processes and the eventual error corrections. It should also trigger maintenance tasks allowing continuous performance optimization. Those enhancements can then be shared with the developers in order to optimize future implementations.

The writer is a certified Sap BW consultant with hands on experience in Sap BW since year 2000.

The paper is very well structured and offers a good overview which can be shared with the decision makers in order to eventually approve the investment. We are talking about a very modest investment which can have very positive effects on the overall data warehouse quality perception.

It is not easy to construct a white paper giving enough information without providing unnecessary technical details. The authors of this white paper managed to provide a good concept overview.

Integration with the incident management system is an excellent way to avoid manual tasks.

Most of all it shows proactivity. It is not needed to wait for the user community to raise an incident, the monitoring team can work on the incident and inform the user community in advance, which increase the trust and confidence in the data warehouse.

Often the “out of time” is noticed at the end of the data processing, when data should be available for reporting. Instead, this solution points out that the single steps start time are traced in order to eventually create warnings in time to correct issues and inform the information consumers proactively.

The writer has noticed over the years that BW is not considered as business critical as the ERP environment as it does not affect operations. In reality BW is a strategic tool as the decisions taken by the management are based on reporting which comes from the data warehouse.