Predictive Analytics: Gaining Certainty for Mission-Critical SAP SLAs

Your SAP systems orchestrate mission-critical business processes, such as meter to cash, supply chain movements, manufacturing schedules, and payroll runs. Meeting the service level agreements (SLAs) associated with these processes isn't just an IT goal; it's a business imperative. Late completions can lead to regulatory fines, missed revenue opportunities, damaged customer relationships, and significant operational disruption.

Given these high stakes, how confident are you that your critical SAP-driven processes will meet their deadlines tonight, tomorrow, or at month’s end? And how do you know when you are back on track? If you’re relying solely on traditional monitoring, you’ll often only gain insights after an issue has occurred—which is akin to navigating complex routes primarily using the rearview mirror. While traditional monitoring remains essential for identifying failures or threshold breaches, this reactive stance can make proactive intervention challenging, especially when subtle delays accumulate across processes.

The problem: Reactive monitoring tells you too little, too late

Traditional monitoring approaches for SAP processes often focus on simple status checks: Did the job complete successfully (green) or did it fail (red)? It may send an alert if a specific job runs longer than a predefined static threshold. Even if it calculates thresholds dynamically, it is a job-to-job calculation and typically does not look at the SLA end-to-end. A job finishing faster does provide a buffer, but a downstream job and the SLA will not be aware of that.

While necessary, this is fundamentally reactive. It tells you about problems after they've already occurred and potentially after the SLA has already been breached. This leaves operations teams constantly firefighting, scrambling to diagnose issues under pressure, and hoping manual interventions can salvage the timeline.

This reactive model is insufficient in several ways:

• Limited foresight: Using traditional tools, teams often struggle to anticipate how current conditions or minor delays within complex job chains will impact future SLA adherence.
• Difficulty pinpointing root cause: Basic alerts on individual job failures may not reveal the true bottleneck within a multi-step, cross-system process, which leads to extended diagnostic time.
• Delays intervention: By the time an alert fires, the window for proactive intervention may have closed, making an SLA violation unavoidable.
• Struggles with hybrid complexity: If teams are relying on siloed monitoring, identifying the root cause grows exponentially harder when processes span SAP and non-SAP systems (such as cloud services, data transfers, and legacy applications).

Simply knowing a process failed or finished late isn't operational intelligence; it's damage reporting.

The solution: Transition from reactive to proactive

Imagine knowing hours in advance that your critical month-end financial closing process is trending towards a potential SLA breach. Imagine automatically pinpointing the specific task—whether inside SAP or in a connected system—causing the slowdown. This is the power of shifting from reactive monitoring to proactive operational intelligence with Automation Analytics & Intelligence (AAI) from Broadcom.

AAI analyzes workloads managed by Automic Automation and other commercial scheduling solutions as well as cloud solutions (such as Airflow).  It determines patterns, trends, and dependencies to provide insights that go far beyond simple status checks. The solution offers these capabilities:

1. Predictive SLA management: This is the game-changer. AAI learns the normal behavior of your complex, multi-step business processes (including all the SAP and non-SAP tasks orchestrated by Automic). It continuously analyzes in-flight processes against learned models and historical data to forecast the estimated completion time. If this prediction indicates a potential SLA violation, AAI raises an alert, giving your team valuable time to proactively investigate and intervene before the deadline is missed.
2. Proactive bottleneck identification (dynamic critical path analysis): When a potential delay is predicted, where do you start looking? AAI automatically identifies the critical path—the specific sequence of tasks within the end-to-end workflow currently influencing the overall completion time. This instantly focuses troubleshooting efforts on the jobs or steps (SAP or otherwise) that matter most, saving precious diagnostic time.
3. Accelerated root cause analysis: Forget manually trawling through logs across different systems. AAI correlates performance data and events across the entire  Automic-orchestrated workflow. It helps rapidly pinpoint the underlying cause of deviations and failures, resource contention, unexpected data volumes, infrastructure issues, or upstream delays—even when the root cause lies outside the core SAP system but has an impact on the SAP process.
4. Historical performance insights for optimization: AAI provides rich dashboards and reporting capabilities. Analyze historical trends in job durations, resource consumption, and SLA adherence. Identify recurring issues, optimize workflow designs, improve scheduling, and inform capacity planning for your SAP environment and related systems.

Intelligence across your orchestrated landscape

The power of AAI stems from its integration with Automic Automation's enterprise-wide orchestration capabilities. It doesn't just analyze SAP jobs in isolation; it analyzes the entire business process orchestrated by Automic, including dependencies and tasks running on non-SAP platforms, including cloud services, mainframes, and data pipelines. This holistic view is essential for accurate prediction and root cause analysis in today's hybrid environments.

Achieving predictability for critical SAP SLAs

Reactive monitoring leaves critical business outcomes to chance. It's time to move beyond guesswork and embrace proactive, predictive operational intelligence. By leveraging Automic Automation with integrated AAI, you gain the foresight needed to anticipate problems, the insight to diagnose them quickly, and the control to ensure your most critical SAP-driven business processes meet their commitments reliably and consistently.

LEARN MORE >> See how a financial services organization eliminates 60% of SLA breaches by using AAI

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