Customer Success Story: SAP
SAP uses InfluxDB to monitor its Cloud Foundry multi-cloud application platform. The SAP Ariba team chose InfluxDB for its ability to tag metric and event data and enjoy using both Grafana and InfluxDB, claiming that the two make a killer combination! SAP also uses InfluxDB with Apache JMeter and Grafana to improve infrastructure performance testing.
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“We researched the best time series platforms and chose InfluxData because it is highly performant, provided high availability, and was more cost effective than the SaaS solutions we were considering,” said Christina Abraham, VP, Global Cloud Infrastructure & Operations at SAP Ariba. “InfluxData was easy to implement and is now the primary data store to collect metrics and events for SAP Ariba operations. InfluxData provides the basis for all the visualizations and alerting that is critical to our business.”
SAP’s idea behind their E2E framework was to develop an enhanced model for automating performance testing and test results analysis, which could then be used by developers to easily debug performance bottlenecks with minimal setup. This implementation proposes real-time log visualization in Grafana dashboards for microservices testing in different labs, of various logs like container logs, Docker logs, Consul logs and application logs. This solution supports high availability and replication for backend storage, and uses InfluxDB for collecting performance test logs from JMeter tests and storing raw data in respective databases. SAP’s solution uses the Telegraf monitoring agent to collect system metrics logs, and visualize different graphs and metrics in Chronograf. This solution helps to qualify any set of metrics against a defined set of rules to arrive at Pass/Fail criteria.
SAP’s solution provides a unified view of all performance metrics, enabling degradation analysis and trend analysis with minimal numbers of clicks. The solution concentrates on feeding all aggregate test results from InfluxDB and will provide an option to the user for comparison analysis, viewing results over a graphical view in Grafana. SAP has developed specific queries to show specific graphs for the entire test duration, which will enable color- coding for each transaction results over a tabular panel. Implementation of self-defensive logic and the InfluxDB socket listener will continuously feed performance results to respective database sources, eliminating the possibility of any data loss and making the results and logs more accurate.
The company likes InfluxDB’s high ingest, integration with other tools, open source platform, performance, and scalability. With its in-house performance framework and using InfluxDB features, SAP implements the following modules in its project:
- Overall performance infrastructure health check alerts running 24/7 autonomously
- Verifying the utilization status of all load generator VMs
- Consolidated aggregated performance metrics and reports for a particular perf test
- Integration with ELK stack tools to keep running log visualization and error analysis
- Telegraf monitoring agent in all app and DB hosts for capturing system and app metrics
SAP Cloud Solution Architect Subhodeep Ganguly found InfluxDB to be a strong and effective solution for any project that needs a time series database for capturing performance or automation test logs in a time series fashion, and for capturing metrics based on these logs. InfluxDB integrates well with JMeter to capture real-time logs and visualization in Grafana. Chronograf’s UI made it easy to monitor any system- or memory- related issue from the ingestion of Telegraf metrics/telemetry data, and Kapacitor was also a powerful alerting tool to monitor custom alerts.