AWS for SAP
Modern observability frameworks for SAP: A solution to monitoring challenges with PowerConnect and Dynatrace
This post was jointly authored with Dynatrace and SoftwareOne PowerConnect. We thank Krzysztof Ziemianowicz, Director of Extension Services at Dynatrace, and Stephen Bangs, SAP Solution Architect at SoftwareOne PowerConnect, for their contributions and support.
Modern SAP environments demand sophisticated monitoring capabilities as business processes extend beyond single systems. Organizations now manage interconnected platforms including SAP Cloud ERP, SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), AWS services, and various cloud solutions. This complexity requires a new approach to system oversight.
Traditional monitoring tools, designed for single-system metrics and reactive alerts, no longer meet the demands of today’s integrated business processes. Modern operations require comprehensive visibility across all connected systems to maintain optimal performance.
SoftwareOne PowerConnect for SAP Solutions addresses these challenges by delivering extensive coverage across the SAP ecosystem. Its observability framework transforms system-specific monitoring into actionable intelligence through OpenTelemetry standards, enabling proactive performance management and real-time operational insights.
By combining PowerConnect’s deep SAP expertise with Dynatrace AI-powered platform, organizations gain:
- Comprehensive system visibility
- Proactive problem detection
- Automated root-cause analysis
- Enhanced business outcomes
This integrated approach provides end-to-end process visibility, helping organizations prevent disruptions and optimize operations across their entire SAP landscape.
Enhance SAP visibility with PowerConnect for SAP on Dynatrace
PowerConnect retrieves observability signals from the SAP Cloud ERP, SAP BTP, and SAP SaaS, and records them in the Dynatrace Grail data lakehouse. This is where organizations can maintain all AWS observability signals, under a unified analytics model – exactly as you look at your entire IT landscape as a single continuum. Dynatrace is part of the AWS Agentic AI Marketplace, and Dynatrace solutions are now natively composable within AWS AI services, such as Amazon Q, Amazon Bedrock, and Amazon SageMaker. This partnership enables enterprises to unlock deeper insights and drive digital transformation with confidence.
The Dynatrace AI-powered observability platform transforms telemetry data into actionable intelligence through sophisticated AI/ML-powered pattern detection and automated analysis. Pre-built Dynatrace dashboards and analytics capabilities provide immediate value, offering intuitive visualization of complex SAP environments and rapidly identifying performance issues and optimization opportunities. The platform’s end-to-end, AI-powered contextual intelligence ensures that organizations can trace transactions and understand dependencies across their entire technology stack.
The diagram below shows how PowerConnect and Dynatrace integrate with SAP Cloud ERP Private on AWS:
Installing PowerConnect for SAP solutions
The installation of PowerConnect for SAP solutions is supported on all SAP systems within the SAP Cloud ERP private (reference: supported products). An organization can request the installation of PowerConnect for SAP solutions as follows:
- Raise a request with SAP Enterprise Cloud Services (ECS) to install PowerConnect ABAP — this covers SAPS/4HANA — and, where needed, PowerConnect Java, which covers SAP Process Orchestration and SAP BusinessObjects.
- Raise a request with SAP ECS to allow-list the Dynatrace tenant URL from the proxy server in SAP’s managed account. For more information, refer to the Dynatrace documentation.
- The organization can then install the PowerConnect for SAP on Dynatrace application from the Dynatrace Hub, which is the access point for users to manage capabilities, including apps and extensions, for the Dynatrace platform.
- Once data starts flowing from the PowerConnect setup on the SAP instance to the Dynatrace tenant, you can visualize and analyze SAP signals using Dynatrace dashboards, services monitoring, transaction tracing, and business analytics features as with any other application observability sources.
After configuration, organizations can leverage ready-made dashboards for common SAP observability use cases:
- Background and batch jobs
- ABAP dumps and runtime errors
- Analysis of security audit logs and application logs
- Work process, locks, and update requests
- Transactional RFC and queued RFC transactions
- IDoc status, IDoc segments, and outbound delivery monitor
Illustration: SAP business process analytics dashboard in Dynatrace
There are more than 200 ready-made dashboards available out of the box in the PowerConnect for SAP on Dynatrace application, and organizations can build their own.
The Distributed Tracing app centralizes and analyzes SAP traces collected by PowerConnect across multiple systems. The Business Flow app maps and evaluates SAP process execution and business events. The following image shows the analysis of business events:
A single solution for all SAP environments
The diagram below shows the standard integration architecture for SAP cloud solutions, including SAP BTP, SAP Integration Suite, SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Ariba, SAP Fieldglass:
This architecture pattern is implemented as follows:
- Organizations provision an Amazon EC2 instance on AWS to host the PowerConnect Cloud standalone agent
- This agent can be installed on a single EC2 instance or on two EC2 instances to provide high availability.
- This Amazon EC2 instance hosting the PowerConnect Cloud component connects to the SAP APIs and extracts signals that are forwarded to Dynatrace.
- The installation steps for the PowerConnect Cloud on Amazon EC2 are provided in the installation documentation.
- The EC2 instance dedicated to PowerConnect Cloud needs connectivity to the SAP BTP platform, the SAP SaaS applications, and the Dynatrace tenant.
- Alternatively, the PowerConnect Cloud instance can be installed in the SAP BTP Cloud Foundry environment with Cloud Foundry command line tools.
Dynatrace provides a single source of data that can instantly present the necessary data in role-oriented dashboards, such as the dashboard examples below for SAP CPI message monitoring, and for SAP BTP syslog insights:
Illustration: SAP CPI message monitoring and SAP BTP syslog insights
Conclusion
The integration of Dynatrace and PowerConnect on AWS delivers this modern observability framework, that goes beyond traditional single-system approaches, providing the comprehensive visibility and AI-powered insights needed for today’s interconnected SAP landscapes. By leveraging AWS’s scalable infrastructure, native AI services integration through the AWS Agentic AI Marketplace, and seamless marketplace deployment options, organizations can quickly implement this solution to transform their SAP monitoring capabilities. This combination of Dynatrace and PowerConnect on AWS, delivers tangible business value as organizations gain real-time insights into business-critical processes, allowing them to identify bottlenecks, optimize workflows, and enhance user experience across their SAP landscape.
Dynatrace Platform and PowerConnect for SAP Solutions are available on AWS Marketplace. Dynatrace, Grail, and the Dynatrace logo are trademarks of the Dynatrace, Inc. group of companies.