The continued growth of e-commerce has led to digital transformation moving at unprecedented speeds, as retailers compete for the attention of over 2.1 billion online shoppers. But as online stores have expanded, they’ve become more complex, and so has the technology underpinning them.
The rise of cloud complexity
Retailers are increasingly adopting multicloud strategies to gain the agility required to succeed. However, moving to the cloud increases complexity, stretching IT teams and resources to the limit. To overcome this, organizations are looking to automate as many of the processes within cloud-native delivery as possible.
Chief to this is the automation of incident management to shorten recovery time when problems occur and reduce manual effort. To enable this, IT teams need a precise configuration management database (CMDB) that can be kept up to date in real-time. That’s only possible if key IT service management (ITSM) solutions can work together with observability and AIOps platforms.
Along with our partner Atos Engage ESM, we recently explored the benefits this creates in a webinar with SAP, which uses Dynatrace and ServiceNow together to support its Commerce Cloud. With Dynatrace and ServiceNow, SAP can maintain a real-time CMDB, linking issues to the relevant events and prioritizing them effectively, based on a full understanding of the business impact.
Delivering on big promises
Martin Auer, Vice President of Customer Experience Observability at SAP, began by outlining the complex technical offering that makes up SAP’s Commerce Cloud, and the big promises the company has made to the customers who build their stores using its platform.
“Each commerce shop is unique because every customer uses different integrations, a different code base, and different coding standards,” Auer explains. “We have over three and a half thousand customers and the transaction volumes are really big. It’s about $500 billion, across 20 plus industries, and more than 100 countries.”
SAP promises every Commerce Cloud customer 99.95% availability, and that the base code of its storefront will load within one second. “This is a big commitment to the market. Every service degradation has a business impact on our customers,” emphasizes Auer. “Think about your own commerce experience. When you go to a webshop and proceed to checkout, and it takes 30 seconds, you might consider buying somewhere else.”
To ensure its customers’ webshops function seamlessly, SAP needs full-stack observability – which is why it chose Dynatrace to give every customer a 360-degree view of their environments.
The Dynatrace-ServiceNow pipeline
Auer explains that the complex production environments of SAP’s customers produce about 50,000 alerts every month, which all feed into ServiceNow, to trigger events and problem tickets. The precise answers from Dynatrace give SAP’s operations teams the context of those alerts in real-time, as well as helping to prioritize them according to the severity and business impact.
Michael Allen, VP of Worldwide Partners at Dynatrace summarizes how this works. “Dynatrace provides observability into dynamic production environments. It senses any deviations from the norm. Dynatrace then suppresses all the noise, links all the symptoms of the problem into that single ticket or event, and then along with root cause, pipes it into ServiceNow.”
Additionally, the integration reduces the time teams spend switching between solutions, speeding up resolution. Auer explains, “We combine observability information like application performance data, real-user behavior, synthetic monitoring, and deep experiential insights to detect issues and identify the root cause. This is reducing time to repair and minimizing business impact.”
A fully automated future
Going forwards, SAP hopes to automate even more of the incident management process using Dynatrace and ServiceNow. Lars Karow, Technical Lead at SAP Customer Experience explained how this will enable SAP to move towards a proactive servicing model.
“We are planning to automatically create a case and inform the customer right away that something is impacting their environment, and that we are working to restore the service as soon as possible,” Karow said.
Dynatrace, along with Atos Engage ESM, has over 500 successful customers like SAP using Dynatrace and ServiceNow together. To learn more about how the integration works, you can register to watch the full session on-demand here.
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