RISE Reality Check

Monitoring & Observability

RISE shifts infrastructure monitoring to SAP, but application and business process observability remain firmly in your domain. Know what to watch and how.

SAP

monitors infrastructure

You

monitor applications

Jobs

are your responsibility

SLAs

need your own metrics

The Monitoring Reality in RISE

One of the most common misconceptions about RISE with SAP is that "SAP handles monitoring." While SAP does take responsibility for infrastructure health—servers, databases, network at the hyperscaler level—everything above that layer remains yours.

This means background job monitoring, interface health, business process KPIs, user experience, and application performance are still your responsibility. If an IDoc fails at 2am, SAP won't alert you. If a batch job runs three times longer than usual, that's yours to detect.

The shift to RISE is an opportunity to modernise your monitoring approach—moving from reactive firefighting to proactive observability. But this requires investment in tooling, processes, and potentially skills you may not have needed when everything was on-premise.

Common Misconception

"SAP monitors everything in RISE" — False. SAP monitors infrastructure. You monitor applications, jobs, interfaces, and business processes.

Last Updated

January 15, 2026

Sources

  • SAP RISE Operations Guide
  • Shared Responsibility Model

Information based on publicly available SAP documentation and industry sources. For the latest details, consult SAP official materials or qualified partners.

Monitoring Responsibility Split

SAP Monitors

  • Infrastructure Health

    Server uptime, compute resources, storage

  • Database Health

    HANA availability, replication, backups

  • Network (within cloud)

    Internal connectivity, load balancers

  • System Availability SLA

    Contracted uptime metrics

You Must Monitor

  • Background Jobs

    Batch job success, duration, scheduling

  • Interfaces / IDocs

    Message processing, errors, queues

  • Application Performance

    Transaction response times, slow queries

  • Business Process KPIs

    Order processing, invoice volumes, exceptions

  • Security Events

    Login failures, authorization violations, audit logs

What You Should Be Monitoring

Background Jobs

  • Job start/end times
  • Success/failure status
  • Duration anomalies
  • Job chains/dependencies
  • Scheduling conflicts

Interfaces

  • IDoc processing status
  • RFC connection health
  • Queue depths
  • Message errors
  • Integration middleware

Performance

  • Dialog response times
  • Database query duration
  • Memory utilization
  • Work process availability
  • Lock wait times

Business Process

  • Document throughput
  • Processing backlogs
  • Exception counts
  • SLA compliance
  • End-to-end latency

Security

  • Failed logins
  • Privilege escalations
  • Critical transaction usage
  • User changes
  • Authorization errors

Data Quality

  • Master data consistency
  • Posting errors
  • Duplicate detection
  • Validation failures
  • Reconciliation gaps

Building an Alerting Strategy

Avoid alert fatigue while catching what matters

P1

Critical Alerts

Immediate action required. Page on-call.

  • • Production job failures
  • • Interface complete failure
  • • Security incidents
  • • Business-stopping errors
P2

Warning Alerts

Address within business hours.

  • • Performance degradation
  • • Job duration anomalies
  • • Queue depth increasing
  • • Approaching thresholds
P3

Informational

Review in daily/weekly reporting.

  • • Trend changes
  • • Usage patterns
  • • Capacity forecasts
  • • Optimization opportunities

Alert Fatigue Prevention

Do:

  • • Set meaningful thresholds based on baselines
  • • Correlate related alerts to reduce noise
  • • Review and tune alerts monthly
  • • Document escalation procedures

Don't:

  • • Alert on every anomaly
  • • Ignore repeated false positives
  • • Send all alerts to everyone
  • • Skip root cause analysis

Monitoring Tools Landscape

SAP-Native Options

  • SAP Cloud ALM

    SAP's cloud-native ALM solution with built-in monitoring capabilities

  • SAP Solution Manager

    Traditional monitoring if you maintain it alongside RISE

  • SAP Focused Run

    Advanced monitoring and alerting for larger landscapes

Third-Party Options

  • Avantra

    SAP-focused AIOps and automation platform

  • IT-Conductor

    Cloud-native SAP monitoring and automation

  • Splunk / Datadog / Others

    General observability platforms with SAP connectors

Monitoring Readiness Checklist

Before Go-Live

  • Monitoring tool selected and configured
  • Critical jobs identified and alerts set
  • Interface monitoring in place
  • Performance baselines established
  • Alert routing and escalation defined
  • On-call procedures documented
  • Dashboard for ops team built
  • Integration with ITSM for tickets

Ongoing Operations

  • Monthly alert threshold review
  • Quarterly capacity planning
  • Weekly ops review meetings
  • Incident post-mortems documented
  • Runbook updates when issues arise
  • Training for new team members
  • Vendor tool updates applied
  • SLA reporting to stakeholders

Assess Your Monitoring Coverage

Take the RISE Responsibility Check to understand your monitoring gaps and get recommendations for building effective observability.

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