Splunking SAP and Turning Data into Action

This is a guest post contributed by Brant Hubbard, CEO & Founder, RHONDOS.

Yesterday, Splunk & SAP announced a partnership focused on enabling The Intelligent Enterprise, “a strategy that allows you to transform data into action across all lines of business—driving process automation and innovation, unlocking new areas of growth, and delivering exceptional experiences.”  

After working with over a hundred Fortune 500 Enterprises looking to better monitor their SAP environments with Splunk, the RHONDOS team couldn’t be more excited about Splunk and SAP’s expanded relationship and the value it will bring to both customers and the partner ecosystem. 

For years, organizations in the know have saved millions of dollars every month by observing and understanding the performance of their SAP applications and infrastructure. 

Their secret?  

Splunking SAP environments using a ready-to-roll application called PowerConnect for SAP & Splunk. 

The business-critical data generated by SAP systems is possibly the most important and valuable data generated across an enterprise. Using PowerConnect to access SAP information and combining it with real-time cloud and infrastructure data in Splunk unlocks unprecedented visibility and a strong competitive advantage. Splunk and PowerConnect are ideal complements to The Intelligent Enterprise, with the proven ability to help organizations reduce P1 issues as much as 30%, slash MTTR by 70%, and achieve compliance with complex, industry-specific security standards.

The Value of Splunk for SAP

As a mission-critical ERP system, SAP has strict retention policies to keep production environments operating efficiently and a standardized transaction schema for maximum supportability across more than 50,000 of the world’s premier companies. As a result, the flexibility of traditional reporting options for critical security and performance-oriented data is limited, making Splunk’s schema-on-read capabilities a true game-changer for the SAP ecosystem.

We’ve witnessed SAP teams discover insights they didn’t even know existed. Within just a day or two of viewing data in Splunk, our customers have seen a user with dangerously elevated permissions, a configuration issue causing those pesky middleware errors that have been popping up for six months, and even simple issues such as abnormally high numbers of users with access to a development system.

The visibility Splunk provides can have substantial implications for the business. 

For example, our team worked with one Fortune 100 manufacturer that narrowly avoided an SAP P1 outage due to a poorly written SQL statement. Splunk’s ability to correlate data from work processes at the application layer with table locks and the associated custom SQL statements at the database layer in real time saved the customer from a disasterous outage. 40 minutes prior to the first red flag, the operations team was alerted and able to quickly identify and fix the issue before it escalated to a full-blown outage — a capability not offered with their traditional monitoring system. 

A single outage can cost businesses over $200,000 an hour. Eliminating SAP P1 events is a top priority from end-users all the way up to the CEO.

Accelerate Time to Value with PowerConnect for Splunk & SAP 

PowerConnect for SAP & Splunk by BNW Consulting is the only solution on the market to have SAP-certified integration with both SAP S/4HANA and SAP NetWeaver for sending ANY decrypted SAP dataset and transaction type (structured or unstructured!) to Splunk. 

With over 50 pre-defined dashboards available in the PowerConnect App, SAP teams are able to investigate security, performance, and business data in real time in ways never before possible.  Custom extractors and dashboards can be quickly created to let organizations do IT their way.

Ultimately, this speeds up investigations, pinpoints root causes faster,  cuts down mean time to resolution, and simplifies the creation of useful alerts for critical SAP events.  

PowerConnect for Splunk & SAP is a proven solution that has been extensively implemented and validated across the most complex and demanding SAP environments in the world. We know because RHONDOS is the exclusive master distributor for PowerConnect in North America and provides 24/7 support on deployments.

Learn More

Next week, RHONDOS, BNW, and Splunk will join SAP at SAP TechEd USA in Las Vegas. Stop by Booth #232 to ask your toughest questions plus don’t miss interactive demos including:

• SAP Daily Checklist. SAP Teams often spend hours manually checking and monitoring various siloed data sets to ensure they meet their SLAs to the business. With the new System Overview Dashboard that aggregates these datasets to a single screen, teams can refocus their energy on driving new and exciting value to their business stakeholders.
• SAP Interface Monitoring. With dashboards dissecting key SAP business functions like batch processing, sales orders, and interface communications, PowerConnect customers can elevate their use of Splunk from technical toolset to enterprise insight.  
• SAP Time Machine. This dashboard allows users to view all key performance metrics on any SAP system during different slices of time, side-by-side. Want to showcase the improvements in SAP performance on Black Friday year over year? 30 seconds and you’re DONE.
• SAP Security Essentials. With over 20 audit reports included out-of-the-box and gorgeous visualizations for user activity and notable events, customers can accelerate cumbersome compliance audits and mitigate insider threats.

We’ll be back in Las Vegas October 21-24 for .conf19, Splunk’s annual user conference. Join us as we brainstorm with SAP customers, answer technical questions and showcase even more demos. If you’re planning on attending .conf19, don’t miss this session: 

IT1642 - How 3M is Transforming SAP ERP Operations through AIOPS (Wed, Oct 23, 1:45-2:30pm)
Discover how 3M is using Splunk to get more value and insights from its mission-critical SAP deployment and complex legacy environment. Managing SAP is a complex and mission-critical challenge. With its proprietary and often-customized inner workings, SAP has become synonymous with complexity and has long been a difficult challenge for IT departments around the globe to manage. With even short outages carrying the potential of large impacts, it is more important than ever for large ERP customers to bring their systems management and monitoring practices into the data-driven world. In this session, learn what transformational outcomes have been and are being achieved as this 116-year-old global manufacturer partners with Splunk to embrace and overcome ERP and legacy operational data chaos.

If you can’t meet with us in person at SAP TechEd USA or .conf19, please check out the wealth of resources available at https://www.rhondos.com. Happy Splunking!

This post can also be viewed on the SAP blog.

Brant Hubbard is the CEO and Founder of RHONDOS. Prior to RHONDOS, Brant founded Expertlaw, the leading legal document composition company and Pod27 an innovative SAAS offering in the media space. His Cybersecurity and IT experience includes roles at Splunk, Redwood (SAP) and as the General Manager of Centennial Software now Ivanti. If you can’t find Brant in his office he is probably fly fishing.