RISE with SAP on AWS allows enterprises to modernise core ERP systems by removing the burden of infrastructure management. SAP operates the underlying platform, database engine, patching and availability, while customers focus on business processes and innovation.
But a managed platform does not mean a transparent platform. The moment an organisation no longer has direct access to operating systems, databases, and SAP Basis tools, a visibility gap appears. That gap affects both technology teams and stakeholders:
- If SAP Fiori performance degrades, how quickly can the business view and diagnose the problem?
- When month-end finance jobs slow down, how do you determine the root cause?
- If integrations between SAP and third-party systems fail, can you trace the failure?
- Can leadership see real-time dashboards covering performance, uptime, and cost on RISE with SAP?
This is where observability becomes essential. By combining AWS native telemetry, SAP application signals and New Relic full-stack observability, organisations restore control, predictability, and data-driven decision-making.
Why Observability Matters for RISE with SAP
RISE with SAP removes infrastructure responsibility but not business responsibility.
Executives still need confidence that critical processes — order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, logistics, payroll, HR and manufacturing — run smoothly. Technical teams still require diagnostic ability when users say, “SAP is slow.”
For leadership, observability provides:
- Transparent performance of cloud-hosted SAP systems
- Real-time insights into user experience in SAP Fiori
- Predictable operational spending
- Compliance and audit data
- Evidence-based service reporting and vendor accountability
For technical teams, observability enables:
- Tracing performance across RISE with SAP, AWS services and integrations
- Monitoring background job durations and failures
- Detecting SAP performance issues before users escalate
- Identifying cost drivers, data growth and inefficient extensions
- Faster root-cause analysis and reduced MTTR
Without observability, SAP becomes a black box. With New Relic, every critical metric, from SAP transaction times to end-user latency, becomes visible and actionable.
Understanding Shared Responsibility
In RISE with SAP, SAP manages:
- Virtualisation and infrastructure
- Operating system and SAP HANA
- Application stack and patching
- Backups, HA, disaster recovery
However, customers are responsible for:
- Business process performance
- SAP Fiori and SAPGUI user experience
- Integrations across AWS, SAP BTP and other applications
- Custom code performance
- Data growth and cost trends
- Executive and operational monitoring dashboards
This is where observability matters most: the areas customers still control directly influence business outcomes, productivity and spend.
How Observability Works with AWS, SAP and New Relic
The most effective model blends three sources of telemetry:
AWS Native Signals
- Amazon CloudWatch for logs and metrics
- CloudWatch RUM for real user monitoring of SAP Fiori
- AWS X-Ray or OpenTelemetry for API visibility
- Optional long-term analytics in Amazon S3 and Athena
SAP Application Signals
- SAP Cloud ALM logs and performance metrics
- Workload analytics for dialog transactions and batch jobs
- SAP Fiori UI behaviour
- Background processing and job queues
New Relic as the Unified Observability Layer
New Relic ingests AWS and SAP signals and turns them into:
- Real-time dashboards
- End-to-end distributed tracing
- Root-cause analysis
- User experience insights
- Capacity and cost forecasting
- SLA/SLO reporting for leadership
This allows customers to see SAP performance, integrations, latency, reliability and cost from one place, without needing OS-level access.
Technical teams can drill down into raw data, traces and logs.
Executives get one clear view of system health.
KPIs That Matter in RISE with SAP
Effective observability focuses on metrics that translate into business value:
- SAP Fiori and SAPGUI response time
- Dialog step performance
- Background job duration and queue bottlenecks
- Integration latency and failure rates
- Incident volume, MTTD and MTTR
- Cost per business transaction
- Data growth in storage and HANA layers
These KPIs help organisations demonstrate service quality to end users and leadership, maintain predictable AWS costs and detect emerging performance issues early.
Implementation Roadmap: From Vision to Live Dashboards
Phase 1 – Strategy & Alignment
- Identify business-critical processes (finance, HR, supply chain)
- Define SLOs and reporting expectations
- Align IT, SAP Basis, DevOps and governance teams
Phase 2 – Technical Enablement
- Enable CloudWatch for SAP environment metrics
- Deploy CloudWatch RUM for SAP Fiori UX telemetry
- Forward logs and metrics into New Relic
- Enable distributed tracing for integrations and extensions
Phase 3 – Dashboards & Reporting
- Executive view: performance, reliability, cost, risk
- Technical view: transaction traces, job analysis, API map
- Automated alerts via Slack, Teams, ServiceNow or Jira
Phase 4 – Continuous Optimisation
- Capacity forecasting
- FinOps analysis for cloud cost efficiency
- Predictive issue detection before SLAs are breached
The Cost of Not Having Observability
- SAP appears healthy, but users experience slow performance
- Month-end payroll or finance jobs fail with no root cause insight
- Integration failures disrupt supply chain or e-commerce operations
- Data growth silently increases cost
- No way to demonstrate SLA compliance
- Audit and security events go undetected
A modern ERP platform without observability is a blind spot.
A RISE landscape instrumented with New Relic becomes measurable, predictable and accountable.
Conclusion
RISE with SAP on AWS gives enterprises a cloud-native ERP foundation, but true operational confidence only comes with observability. By unifying AWS telemetry, SAP workload data and New Relic, organisations gain:
- Real-time visibility into SAP Fiori and transaction performance
- Faster root-cause analysis and reduced downtime
- Predictable operational costs through FinOps reporting
- Compliance and audit-ready monitoring
- Dashboards for both executives and engineers
In short, observability is how businesses turn RISE from just a managed service into a strategic, data-driven and reliable platform.