>> Hey friends, you know customers run
their SAP landscapes and some of the biggest VMs in Azure,
such as the M-series VM and HLIs.
Running these systems in the Cloud,
they need an easy way to monitor
them and visually correlate telemetry data
between the various parts like
infrastructure server, cluster databases, etc.
Syeda Persia Aziz is here to show us how they can use
Azure Monitor for SAP solutions to
deploy monitoring resources and collect
end-to-end telemetry all in one place today on Azure Friday.
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>> Hey friends, I'm Scott Hanselman it's
another episode of Azure Friday.
I'm here with Syeda Persia Aziz,
and we're going to learn about Azure Monitor for SAP solutions.
I have to confess,
I don't know anything about SAP other than it's
big and maybe it's scary or maybe it's not scary.
>> Well SAP, I wouldn't call it scary.
It is a large multinational company and they are experts
of developing business processes software
and the enterprise software.
They have a software suite
of various scales and some are really large,
so large that when customers use Azure for there SAP environment,
they have to use the largest of the VMSQs
and also if they choose to use bare metal,
those are like really large [inaudible] machines
like HLI or VLI, things like that.
>> So maybe I was scared because someone told me that they
use Godzilla scale VMs.
Like you said, the biggest VMs that we sell.
>> That's true. Yeah, that's true.
Those are Godzilla scale VMs,
the N series VMs,
the largest VMs that we offer.
Yeah, they have to use that for
a lot of their applications actually
and for databases for example also.
>> Okay. So when you're running these systems in the Cloud,
you need a way to monitor them and be able to manage that.
All that information coming out of it.
Telemetry, there's the infrastructure server,
the clusters, the databases there in memory system.
That sounds overwhelming.
Maybe you could show me the architecture.
>> Sure. Yes. First of all,
what we built here, which we call Azure Monitor for SAP solutions,
it's an Azure native monitoring solution for
our customers who run their SAP workloads on Azure.
This is a high level overview of how it looks like.
Customer can go to the Azure portal because this product is
available in Azure Marketplace and they can request one,
and then our service will deploy the solution,
the Azure Monitor for SAP solution in their subscription.
You can see that there is like
a managed resource group which contains
all of the resources that really power-up the solution.
The resources talk to
several source system to collect telemetry from them.
Quickly, I would show how it look,
the create experience looks like for this one.
Like I said, this is available on Azure Marketplace.
To create a monitor,
you don't have to put in a lot of information here.
It's just the basics like subscription,
resource group and then you give a name, region.
One key thing here is
a virtual network and subnet that I showed here.
This subnet will give the monitor ability
to connect to the source system that the user wants to monitor.
Also there is an option to share data with Microsoft support.
There were two reasons behind this product when we started it.
One was, of course,
enable the customer to monitor
their SAP system and the other one is from Azure,
so that we can support our customers
better when there is an issue or
where basically have some data so that
we can troubleshoot better and in an easier fashion.
Next, after you put in the basics,
you can add more providers here.
I'll talk about providers and a little bit.
It's a key concept for Azure Monitor for
SAP solutions and tags and then you can review create.
For the interest of time,
I'm not going to create one right now,
but I'll just quickly go through one which is already deployed.
You can see this is the Manage Experienced page.
You can see the subnet name and manage
resource group that I showed in the architecture diagram.
One key thing is log analytics workspace,
which contains all the raw data that we collect.
We do provide the customers with some default visualizations.
But if the customers want to have
their own visualization and custom alerting,
they can always do so by accessing
the raw data directly in log analytics workspace.
The key things I want to talk about is providers.
What is exactly a provider?
A provider is a competent that
collects telemetry from a specific source type.
For example, here in this monitor,
you can see that there are three kinds of providers.
So Microsoft SQL server,
High-availability cluster and then SAP HANA.
I'll just go through Workbooks,
we'll go through the Workbooks quickly,
which will give you the visualization of the data.
You can see that the SAP HANA provider is monitoring multi-node,
four-node system here and it shows all the status,
quick snapshot of the CPU memory disk and utilization.
If you want to take a look at the utilization closely,
can come here and you can see the CPU
and you can also see the memory.
You can see that there is a drop in
the memory utilization at this point of time.
So these are all useful information for users who use HANA.
>> Now, if I may, what is HANA?
That there memory database?
That's the heart of SAP?
>> Yes. HANA is a large scale in-memory
database that a lot of customers
use as their back-end database server for their SAP system.
It's an in-memory database.
It's so large. The memory is really large,
I'm talking terabytes here.
The memory is that large.
Usually they handle critical workload
so that's why the data is actually loaded into the memory.
>> I see. So monitoring these things is absolutely essential.
The load, the cache.
All the things that we're seeing in your dashboard here?
>> Yes. Yes, those are absolutely critical.
Also one thing HANA does is,
it takes backup of the logs,
can also do data backups. You can see.
This is another very useful information for the customer as well.
You can see the backup size and the duration.
Although you can see individual information
of each backup here as well.
This is all HANA and if you
have replications enables which is the HANA system replication,
then you can see that here.
For example, there was
an error with the replication and this error shows up and
the user will see this and take appropriate action to fix those.
This is one of the providers,
the SAP HANA providers.
Another provider I would like to talk
about is high availability cluster.
What it means is, when you have
two nodes and there is a high availability cluster setup,
meaning one is primary another is secondary.
So the primary is done the secondary takes over.
This is another very important use case for our customers,
and then he can see that there are two nodes,
they're all up and running,
and you can check the status of the resources
that really sets up the high availability part here.
Let's talk about Microsoft SQL Server.
This is another provided that we have.
As of now, you saw telemetry regarding cluster health and
then also utilization of the infrastructure here.
We do show like infrastructure related telemetry here,
but you can also see statistics and then you can see things like,
say, top 10 SQL statements that we're on.
>> Wow. Hang on,
this is interesting because I thought that SAP would be
an opaque application and we
would be looking at just the infrastructure details,
CPU and memory and disk access.
But suddenly now we're in a different provider.
I'm hearing you say that the SQL Server provider is
choosing to give us additional contexts and you're actually
saying popular or hot SQL queries in the system,
is that up to the provider to make those decisions?
>> Yeah, it's up to the providers.
So what I showed here,
you have three providers.
The HANA provided here,
we wrote that is very much focused to our infrastructure.
But if there is a requirement
where the customer wants to see some application telemetry,
then we can write a provider for them and just plug it in here.
Its just that its more like a framework.
So as we have more needs to do more monitoring on different kind,
we can write providers of
that specific type and just plug it in to
their existing monitor to
basically extend their monitoring ability.
>> That's really powerful because all of this is
being built on top of the Azure Monitor infrastructure,
which Azure uses to monitor itself.
That'll scale and you don't have to worry about that.
It's monitoring as a service.
Then wow, look at all the data
that you're seeing here on your dashboard.
>> Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty cool actually.
This is the third provider I wanted to talk about.
So next week, July 15th,
we are actually going public preview.
Then we are always looking for our customer feedback,
and then feature requests,
we're always looking for them.
We would request our customers to try this out.
>> If I may, I'm noticing in your tabs here,
that's a GitHub icon.
I don't think about SAP and open source,
but it looks like is this open-source?
>> The provider parse that we showed here everything,
that's all open source, actually.
If you go here,
you will see all the logic that we write to collect the telemetry.
>> That's great.
>> The users can come here and
basically see what we're running to get those telemetry.
This part is open source and you can see what we are collecting.
This is pretty cool, this part, yeah.
>> That is pretty cool. Then on the next tab,
you said that you're going public preview
and you want to hear from folks.
They can go to that location.
We'll put links in the show notes
and learn all about the architecture of this,
designing your own and really monitoring
all aspects that you care about, about your solutions.
>> Yeah. They can come here,
learn about a solution.
It gives you an idea of what it
does and then the high level architecture.
It also talks about the current providers that we support,
the workbooks that I showed you with the visualization.
It tries to do
a deep dive into each provider type and their capabilities.
>> Fantastic. Well, I've learned a whole bunch of stuff today.
Thank you so much for spending time with me.
>> Thank you so much, Scott, for having me.
>> All right. We've been learning all about
Azure Monitor for SAP solutions,
deploying resources to collect
end-to-end telemetry all in one place,
today on Azure Friday.
>> Hey, thanks for watching this episode of Azure Friday.
Now, I need you to like it,
comment on it, tell your friends, retweet it.
Watch more. Azure Friday.
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