Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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?"

SAP system refresh automation is extremely powerful when leveraged with care; system refreshes are complex and challenging processes to manage. System refreshes can be fraught with risk for organizations with critical data due to their level of complexity. Mitigating this risk comes down to knowing the benefits of automation and how the processes work. This article will help you: To try out Avantra's SAP automation features, sign up for a free trial.

Cloud ERP arrives as the new holy grail of ERP architecture: a composable, flexible and scalable collection of core business services working together to meet enterprise ERP needs. Of course, getting there for a large enterprise with significant existing complexity across legacy SAP implementations isn't a trivial task. Much has been written about S/4HANA migration, but less explored are the benefits of automation solutions used for the regular operations of SAP to migration projects. These solutions offer a number of accelerators and benefits to migration projects and SAP teams, so it is worth exploring.

SAP AWS hybrid cloud is a mixed environment consisting of a combination of on-premises infrastructure, private cloud services, and the public cloud - e.g., Amazon Web Services (AWS) - with the ability to exchange information between different environments.

"Do I need to monitor SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition?" is the question many SAP customers are asking right now as projects are going live. As an SaaS product run by SAP, customers get access only through a public website, and SAP are responsible for the availability of that website and the hardware resources. The places where traditional monitoring focussed either aren't relevant, aren't visible, or superficially aren't the customer's problem anymore. Does that mean there is no need to monitor anything in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition?