Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

The cloud is the cheapest processing you can buy... until you get the bill! Unfortunately, Cloud service costs are notoriously opaque when it comes to transactional and operations costs. The results can be unexpected bills and even damage to the ROI of cloud programs. SAP BTP is no exception, but it doesn't have to be this way. Good FinOps discipline is readily available for BTP - and beyond avoiding "bill shock" such monitoring is just good operational hygiene, preserving budget and resources for productive investment.

In mid-2024, SAP announced the discontinuation of SAP Landscape Management ("LaMa"). This wasn't a huge surprise, as the 2027 end-of-support date aligns neatly with Solution Manager, Focused Run and standard support for ECC. SAP also terminated work on SAP Landscape Management Cloud, discontinuing that product immediately. Responses to the post were as expected: customers asking, "What now?" and even expressing a bit of dismay. One response from SAP was especially telling: "Moving the ERP system to the cloud hands over the tasks realized with SAP Landscape Management to SAP as cloud vendor.

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.