From Monitoring to Observability: Elevating SAP Performance with New Relic
SAP systems are the engine rooms of enterprise operations, powering finance, logistics, HR, and core business processes. But as IT landscapes become more distributed and dynamic, traditional SAP monitoring tools struggle to keep up. Today’s business demands real-time visibility, cross-system insights, and fast incident resolution, and that’s where modern observability comes in.
At Bion, we help enterprises take the leap from fragmented monitoring to end-to-end SAP observability with New Relic, enabling performance, availability, and business alignment at scale.
The Problem with Traditional SAP Monitoring
Legacy tools such as SAP Solution Manager were designed in an era of monolithic, on-premise infrastructure. They’re useful for system-level checks within SAP itself, but fall short in today’s observability requirements.
Here’s what we see across enterprise SAP estates:
- Lack of real-time visibility into end-user transactions and business-critical workflows
- Siloed metrics — application logs, infrastructure events, and user behaviour are monitored separately
- Complex root cause analysis when an issue spans SAP, databases, APIs, or external services
- Poor alignment between IT performance and business outcomes
What Is SAP Observability — and Why New Relic?
Observability means understanding what’s happening across your systems in real-time, not just within SAP, but across the entire digital ecosystem that supports it.
New Relic enables exactly that. It’s a full-stack observability platform that ingests and correlates:
- SAP logs and metrics
- Infrastructure and cloud telemetry (e.g. AWS, Azure, GCP)
- Business transaction traces
- User experience insights
- Synthetic checks, alerts, and anomalies
With New Relic’s Telemetry Data Platform, you can stream SAP data alongside non-SAP signals, break down silos, and uncover the actual root cause of performance issues — even when they originate outside of SAP itself.
How Bion Enables SAP Observability with New Relic
We work with organisations to turn New Relic into a strategic SAP monitoring solution, tailored to the complexity of enterprise environments.
● End-to-End SAP Monitoring Across the Stack
Bion configures New Relic to capture SAP application telemetry, including HANA database metrics, SAP Java stack logs, and business-critical transaction traces. We ensure this is seamlessly integrated with infrastructure and cloud telemetry.
● Business-Centric Dashboards for SAP
We design dashboards in New Relic to map SAP technical metrics to business processes, like order-to-cash, payroll, or procurement. This enables business teams to visualise IT performance from their perspective.
● Real-Time Alerts and Intelligent Correlation
New Relic’s AI-driven alerting reduces noise by correlating symptoms across multiple systems. We help set thresholds, SLOs, and automation policies so that SAP issues are flagged before users feel the impact.
● Synthetic Monitoring for SAP Portals
We implement synthetic user testing within New Relic for SAP web interfaces, ensuring login, navigation, and transaction flows remain fast and functional around the clock.
Why It Matters: Observability That Aligns IT with Business
Modernising SAP monitoring with New Relic isn’t just a technical win — it unlocks real business value:
- Faster resolution times (lower MTTR)
- Improved end-user experience across SAP Fiori, NetWeaver, and connected services
- Reduced business disruption due to early detection and prevention
- More reliable digital transformation (e.g. S/4HANA migrations, cloud adoption)
With Bion and New Relic, your teams can proactively manage SAP performance, increase trust in IT operations, and focus on continuous improvement, not just incident firefighting.
Typical Use Cases We Support
- Monitoring HANA performance degradation
- Detecting API bottlenecks between SAP and third-party systems
- Visualising Fiori application latency across regions
- Correlating SAP downtime with AWS infrastructure events
- Observing SAP Portal user journeys using synthetic checks
- Mapping key business transactions from the frontend to the SAP backend
Final Thoughts
SAP environments are evolving — and so should your monitoring strategy. Traditional tools leave blind spots, especially when your operations depend on a mixture of SAP, cloud platforms, and distributed services.
With Bion’s expertise in SAP and New Relic observability, organisations can gain unified visibility, reduce operational risk, and drive better outcomes, both for IT and for the business.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Can New Relic monitor SAP applications directly?
Yes. Bion enables New Relic to ingest key telemetry from SAP systems, including logs, metrics, infrastructure health, and application performance indicators.
Q: How is New Relic different from SAP Solution Manager?
SAP Solution Manager focuses on SAP systems in isolation. New Relic provides full-stack observability, allowing you to see SAP systems and how SAP interacts with cloud infrastructure, APIs, databases, and external services — in real time.
Q: Do I need to replace my current SAP tools to use New Relic?
Not necessarily. Bion helps you augment your existing tools with New Relic, enabling a richer, more complete view of your landscape without disrupting established processes.
Q: How long does it take to implement New Relic for SAP monitoring?
Most of our clients see results within weeks. We tailor our delivery model to your environment — whether you’re running ECC, S/4HANA, or hybrid SAP landscapes.
Q: What is the difference between SAP monitoring and SAP observability?
Monitoring checks the system status using predefined metrics. Observability enables real-time, in-depth understanding of how and why systems behave the way they do by correlating logs, metrics, and traces.