Operations baseline for SAP on Azure
This article builds on a number of considerations and recommendations defined in the Azure landing zone article enterprise-scale design area for management and monitoring. Following the guidance in this article will help explore how to operationally maintain an SAP platform on Azure enterprise estate, with centralized management and monitoring at the platform level. The article presents key recommendations for SAP operations teams to maintain SAP systems within the Azure platform. Since SAP is a mission-critical platform, the guidance on the enterprise-scale design areas should also be included in your design.
Design considerations:
Here are some design considerations for SAP on Azure monitoring and management:
Consider a centralized Azure Log Analytics workspace with Azure Monitor and Application Insights for establishing platform and application-layer monitoring.
Consider inter-virtual machine (VM) latency monitoring for latency-sensitive applications.
Consider scheduling
AzAcSnapfrom a central VM rather than on individual VMs.
Design recommendations:
Here are some design recommendations for SAP on Azure monitoring and management:
Monitor SAP systems and solutions.
Use SAP Solution Manager and Azure Monitor for SAP Solutions to monitor SAP HANA, high-availability SUSE clusters, and SQL systems.
Run a VM Extension for SAP check. VM Extension for SAP uses the assigned managed identity of a virtual machine to access VM monitoring and configuration data. The check ensures that all performance metrics that appear inside your SAP application come from the underlying Azure Extension for SAP.
Protect your HANA database with Azure Backup service. If you deploy Azure NetApp Files (ANF) for your HANA database, use the Azure Application Consistent Snapshot tool (AzAcSnap) to take application-consistent snapshots.
Create a monitoring platform using SAP telemetry tools tools to provide business process insights.
Use Network Watcher Connection Monitor to monitor SAP database and application server latency metrics, or collect and display network latency measurements with Azure Monitor.
Use Azure Site Recovery monitoring to maintain disaster recovery service health for SAP application servers.
Optimize and manage SAP Basis operations by using SAP Landscape Management (LaMa). Use the SAP LaMa connector for Azure to relocate, copy, clone, and refresh SAP systems.
Perform a quality check for SAP HANA on the provisioned Azure infrastructure to verify that provisioned VMs comply with SAP HANA on Azure best practices.
For each Azure subscription, run an Azure Availability Zone latency test before zonal deployment to choose low-latency zones for SAP on Azure deployment.
Implement threat protection for SAP with Microsoft Sentinel.