SAP
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SAP Commerce Cloud is a proven commerce solution built mainly for large enterprises with advanced B2B, B2C, and B2B2C use cases. SAP Commerce Cloud can be customized to meet specific needs and manage even the most complex catalogs, products, and configurations for creating exceptional, hyper-personalized omnichannel experiences. The solution also comes with powerful and comprehensive B2B commerce capabilities.
SAP Commerce Cloud wanted to avoid downtime and, should it be unavoidable, to minimize any issues as quickly as possible. They use Catchpoint for outage detection to:
- Observe all systems through a single dashboard.
- Identify the source of business issues within three minutes.
- Uphold a high standard of customer experience excellency.
We get Catchpoint alerts within seconds when a site is down. And we can, within three minutes, identify exactly where the issue is coming from and inform our customers and work with them.
Problem
This is a summary of an interview with Martin Norato Auer, vice president of observability at SAP Customer Experience. The piece has been edited for clarity.
My name is Martin Norato Auer, and I’m the vice president for the observability team at SAP Customer Experience. SAP Commerce Cloud is a platform as a service.
Catchpoint is a part of the SAP infrastructure plus SAP code. The customers then build on top with their customizations, payment provider integrations, their own look and feel, and their own business processes.
When it comes to observability, SAP leadership is interested in two situations. The first is to avoid any kind of downtime. The second is that if downtime does happen, we need to be as fast and as close to the customer as possible.
Solution
Catchpoint is our main tool for outage detection. Once an alert in Catchpoint is received, we have a team that analyzes the request. If this analysis shows that we have a “business down” situation, the outage detection team starts the notification process and informs our situation room.
We also trigger Catchpoint tests to verify whether the site is behaving as it should. We get Catchpoint alerts within seconds when a site is down. We can, within three minutes, identify exactly where the issue is coming from and inform our customers and work with them.
Catchpoint can observe from the site, the Internet, and multiple observers. Because of this, we know exactly from where a site is slow, from which region a problem originates, or whether customers, for example, have stuff like content delivery networks (CDNs) implemented. We can also give our customers and ourselves the best visibility into the commerce sites.
For us, the most valuable aspect of the Catchpoint solution is that Catchpoint has moved more and more into the Application Programming Interface (API) world. We can have more integrations now.
We don’t want to go to a website. We want to have everything integrated. We want to have one dashboard where we see all the information from all our tools. That is only possible with the API options that Catchpoint offers.
Results
One specific issue where Catchpoint was a big, big help for us was a recent situation involving an issue at one of the big CDN (content delivery networks) providers. We had multiple customers affected, and we saw in our tools right away that this was not a single customer issue but rather something that impacted a number of customers that all use the same CDN. We got that information from Catchpoint.
As a result, we could go right into our communication tools and tell all the affected customers to check with their CDN provider, because it was the reason their sites were down. That, of course, helped our customers react faster. On the SAP side, it saved resources because we didn’t have to look at every individual customer individually.
Catchpoint has a great team that goes beyond a business relationship. I think it's important to establish a good partnership so you know what you buy and so you leverage the full potential of Catchpoint. Assess what options you have, what's required for your business, and then make your decision about what functionality is most important to your business.
If you need help, the Catchpoint professional service is a really helpful resource, because they have a very deep business understanding. They are like an extension of our team – a resource we know we can always depend on.