In the SAP ecosystem, Kyma is increasingly adopted as a powerful platform to build and extend cloud-native applications and services. Given Kyma’s foundation on Kubernetes and its integration of multiple microservices, ensuring strong observability is critical for maintaining system health, troubleshooting issues, and optimizing performance. This article discusses best practices for achieving effective observability in Kyma, empowering SAP teams to monitor, analyze, and maintain their cloud-native SAP extensions with confidence.
Observability refers to the ability to understand the internal state of a system by examining its outputs—logs, metrics, and traces. In Kyma, which runs on Kubernetes and often manages complex event-driven architectures and serverless functions, observability is key to detecting problems early and ensuring smooth operation of SAP business processes.
Kyma integrates multiple open-source observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, and Jaeger, which provide metrics, dashboards, and distributed tracing respectively.
Start with instrumenting your SAP extension components and custom services with standardized telemetry:
Kyma comes pre-integrated with observability stacks:
Use these components to build SAP-specific monitoring dashboards that highlight key performance indicators like API latency, function invocation counts, error rates, and resource usage.
SAP Kyma extensions often involve event-driven communication and chained service calls. Distributed tracing helps track requests as they travel through multiple components:
Monitoring alone isn’t enough. Configure alerting rules that combine:
Alerts should be actionable, minimizing noise but providing early warnings to operations or DevOps teams.
In multi-tenant SAP environments, organize observability data by namespaces and labels to isolate tenant-specific issues and resource usage. This helps in delivering tailored monitoring and troubleshooting access while maintaining data security.
Store all monitoring and alerting configurations as code in Git repositories. Use CI/CD pipelines to deploy changes to observability tooling. This practice ensures version control, auditability, and repeatability—crucial for regulated SAP environments.
Since observability data can contain sensitive SAP business information:
Observability is not a one-time setup but an ongoing process:
Observability is a cornerstone of operational excellence in SAP Kyma environments. By following best practices—instrumenting applications, leveraging Kyma’s integrated tools, implementing distributed tracing, setting meaningful alerts, and securing observability data—SAP teams can ensure their cloud-native extensions perform reliably and align with business goals.
As Kyma adoption grows in SAP landscapes, investing in robust observability will accelerate innovation, reduce downtime, and enhance user satisfaction.