Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Your enterprise APM tool shows SAP is using 90% CPU. The dashboard turns red. An alert fires. Now what? You open Dynatrace. You see the Java Virtual Machine metrics for your NetWeaver stack. You see HTTP response times for your Fiori apps. You see a spike in database calls. None of this tells you why VA01 takes 45 seconds to create a sales order. None of this tells you which custom ABAP report is consuming memory. None of this explains the short dump that crashed your pricing routine. This is the gap between generic APM and true SAP application performance monitoring. Your enterprise tools see the symptoms.

Organizations transitioning from traditional on-premises SAP systems to Cloud ERP (formerly known as "RISE" and "GROW") have a new set of monitoring challenges. Unlike the familiar on-prem landscape, where IT teams enjoyed full visibility and control, cloud environments can feel like a "black box," with limited direct access to the underlying infrastructure and reliance on service tickets to understand system status.

I am pleased to announce the release of Avantra 25.2! While 25.2 is a service release focused on software stability, it introduces several powerful new features designed to streamline SAP automation and improve operational resilience. Let's break down the key deliverables and benefits for Avantra users in this release.

2025 and 2027 are well documented dates in SAP circles. Many SAP users have viewed the transition to S/4HANA and Cloud ERP as an opportunity for transformation, eliminating technical debt and enabling innovation. Just as many have recognized the complexity and size of the project, and opted for a technical upgrade, often called brownfield migration or a lift-and-shift, as the first step of a larger Cloud ERP journey. Driving the migration project urgency, commercial incentives and transition options from SAP may ease end of support dates for existing systems.

Enterprises trust Ansible for fast, reliable infrastructure automation, including terraform for automated cloud provisioning. Many organizations using Ansible leverage Ansible SAP playbooks for SAP infrastructure automation. Avantra extends the scope of SAP operations using Ansible, adding observability, ITSM and ALM solution integration, and orchestration across the SAP estate. Avantra and Ansible together provide a closed-loop solution where monitoring, automation and proof of outcome live in one place across on-premise, hyperscaler and private cloud ERP implementations.

Anyone working in the SAP market in 2025 is aware of two big topics: migration to cloud-based ERP and the end of many long-used tools for managing SAP operations including Focused Run, Landscape Manager and Solution Manager. Both are impossible to ignore. Cloud-based ERP presents a new era of business software possibilities, and with it the opportunities and complexities of migration, transformation, and leveraging the elastic capacity and scalability of cloud-based designs. But right behind it, the question becomes "how are we going to run and manage this?"