Skip to main content

# Avantra overview

Welcome to the Avantra Product Documentation. All information here will aid you with operation of your Avantra landscape.

Avantra is an application designed to automate and simplify the operation of an SAP Landscape. Avantra removes manual effort and provides a platform through which you can connect landscape observations (checks and monitoring) with engagements (notifications and integrations) and finally trigger and deploy automations. For you, the operator, Avantra will:

- Reduce your manual and repetitive tasks
- Filter out the noise and only involve you when something is actually wrong
- Allow you to design and deploy your own observations and automations
- Integrate your SAP Landscape status with the rest of IT
- Increase your overall security posture automatically

## Monitoring overview​

Monitoring & observation (Checks and Reporting) is key to understanding the health of your SAP world. Avantra has had monitoring at its core since the start. Avantra is designed from the core to excel at landscape observation across 5 types of monitored objects:

- Server (foundational object for all others)
- Database
- SAP System
- SAP Instance
- Cloud Service ( and/or 3rd party API endpoints)

A grouping of monitored systems including any or all of the above is called a System Selector. System selectors can be dynamic where the contents of the group are based on criteria (e.g. all systems that are running a Windows operating system) or they can be static where you decide which systems are included.

Each of these monitored objects is monitored and observed across:

- Standard Checks (Out of the box)
- User-defined Checks (custom checks)
- Dashboards and Reporting
- Business Services (technical mapping of processes across multiple systems)
- Monitoring Parameters (dynamic thresholds)
- Parameter Sets (collections of configuration applied dynamically)

## Notifications​

Notifications are one of the most important components of Avantra (after our monitoring and observation capabilities). You need to be able to inform the right people/systems and automations at the right time and in-response to an event. The Avantra notification management system will do this for you.

A Notification is a response when something has changed within Avantra. For instance, a critical check result needs to be passed on to a 3rd party IT service management solution, or somebody wants to receive a notification on their mobile phone. A notification can also trigger an automation, for instance, perhaps you want to auto-gather root-cause analysis information at the exact moment when a problem was detected.

While Avantra comes with native integration to platforms like ServiceNow and AWS SMS, other services can be used by the generic REST and SOAP interfaces. To date, there is no 3rd party system Avantra has failed to connect-to and work with. There are also many more output channel types, a simple but versatile one is running a command-line executable.

Key areas for notifications and integrations include:

- Defining the actions to respond to
- Configuring notification endpoints (output channels)
- Reducing noise with filters
- Enriching notifications with Resolvers
- Triggered automations from notifications
- Setting up synchronization integrations

### Notification endpoints (output channels)​

- Email
- Mobile App
- ServiceNow Incidents or Events
- AWS SNS or SMS
- Run an automation
- 3rd party systems
- Run OS commands
- And much more…​

## Integrations​

Avantra provides many ways of integrating with 3rd party products and platforms. In general, we distinguish two ways of integrations: outbound and inbound. Some integrations, for example, the integration to the hyperscaler platforms like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google, or the ServiceNow, work in both directions. These integrations are first set up in a general way on the API level, and then the same API integration can be used in different outbound and inbound scenarios throughout the product.

Key areas for integrations include:

### Inbound integrations​

- Avantra SOAP API
- Avantra GraphQL RESTful API (beta)
- Avantra Command Line Interface
- ServiceNow (auto-create monitored objects)
- Google Cloud (auto-create monitored objects)
- Azure Cloud (auto-create monitored objects)
- AWS (auto-create monitored objects)

### Outbound integrations​

- ServiceNow Service Graph
  - Sync your Avantra monitored objects to ServiceNow
- ServiceNow Incident Output Channel (via notifications)
  - Create incidents in ServiceNow
- ServiceNow Event Output Channel (via notifications)
  - Create events in ServiceNow
- SAP HotNews and Security Analysis (via the SAP Backbone)
  - Auto download and detect SAP HotNews & Security note requirements
- Outbound RESTful API (via notifications)
  - Integrate with any REST API endpoint
- Outbound SOAP API (via notifications)
  - Integrate with any SOAP API endpoint
- Outbound Email
- Amazon Simple Notification Service

## Automation in Avantra​

Automation is defined in Avantra as reducing the amount of human interaction that is needed to perform a task or activity that changes a monitored system in some way. This is to distinguish it from our monitoring capabilities, or Observe Automation where we automate your daily and real time checks to keep a system up and running.

For example, activities that automatically read and calculate the current status and performance of your SAP Jobs are best implemented as checks to give the full power of notification management, reporting and analytics we provide. Whereas starting new SAP Jobs or rerunning existing failed jobs are best implemented as an automation workflow to make use of the specific features of our automation engine, such as building upon the many built in and Step Library steps, track execution progress and combine manual and automatic tasks together.

The automation engine at the heart of Avantra is designed to provide you out of the box automation capability as well as allowing you design and deploy your own custom automations (even if you're not a coding expert!).

- Automation engine overview
- Avantra provided automations (enterprise add ins)
- Building your own automations
- Execution, triggering and scheduling

In this section we will describe our automation engine in detail and how you can make best use of it in your Avantra.

note

This functionality is only available with the Avantra Automation, Cloud and Enterprise Editions. For more information about editions please see the Avantra Editions Matrix.

## Core components of automation​

We've defined a series of terms used to create an automation. Let's look at each of them:

- Workflows
  We've introduced a new term above Workflows. This term is used to describe a series of steps that perform a task. A step can either be one of our Built-in Steps, delivered as one of our Automation Templates, built yourself in JavaScript using our Built in Steps or be another Workflow itself. In this way, workflows are incredibly reusable for different tasks and purposes. Workflows for more information.

- Steps
  Our Built in Steps perform commonly used tasks and allow access to the inner workings of Avantra without complex coding. They are often combined with custom JavaScript based Built in Steps steps to implement the desired logic. Steps have parameters that allow them to be configured and reused in different scenarios. There are many built in Parameter Types that can be chosen. See Built in Steps for more information.

- Namespaces
  Every automation object (workflow or step) in Avantra must be assigned to a Namespace. Namespaces allow for granular permissions to be applied to the workflows and steps that you build and import within Avantra. It is important to familiarise yourself with the Namespace concept as you get started with automating in Avantra. See Namespaces for more information.

- Automation Templates
  We supply pre-built Workflows and Built in Steps steps for common scenarios that our customers can download and use (depending on license installed). These pre-built items have their source code and configuration visible so our customers can copy and modify these for their own purposes. See Automation Templates for more information.

- Execution
  Executing, Running Workflows is about how a workflow can be started, how it can be monitored and how manual operators can use workflows to drastically accelerate a complex task by offloading the repetitive work to Avantra. We support multiple methods for starting a workflow:

  - Manually from the Avantra UI
  - Automatically on a schedule
  - Automatically based on a notification in Avantra
  - By using our API

  See Running Workflows for more information.

### Avantra architecture​

It is important to have a good understanding of the overall Avantra architecture as you plan to implement or extend Avantra.

- The components of an Avantra system
- Server
- Agent
- SAP Transports
- Network Architecture

## Service provider perspective​

A major difference between Avantra and almost all other system management applications is the focus on a Service Provider perspective. Avantra is designed consistently keeping Service Providers and large-scale enterprises in mind.

Therefore Customers are a fundamental building block in Avantra. Every System is assigned to a Customers (in the meaning of the Customers being the System owner). On the other hand, Users in Avantra are assigned to Customers as well when it comes to Permissions: a User either represents a Customers or has the permission to perform certain tasks on behalf of the Customers (or even for all Customers if a user represents the Service Provider itself).

It is perhaps best to think of Customers as a simple grouping mechanism (for example, for Systems) on the one hand, and as the smallest entity for which you can grant Permissions on the other.

Even more, Customers can be arranged in a hierarchical structure. Due to the inheritance of Permissions, more complex groupings can be achieved.

Other areas, where the Service Provider perspective plays an important role, are:

- Service Level Reports: they are generated on a per-Customers level, obviously.
- The completely web-based user interface - Avantra WebUI: it allows representatives of the Service Provider and the Customers to work on exactly the same data without the need to deploy any GUI application.
- An integrated problem management (ticketing) and change request application.
- Mobile Access: The Avantra Mobile App provides a subset of Avantra WebUI functions optimized for iOS and Android Phones as well as the ability to receive push notifications from your Avantra system.
- [Agent Self Updates]: Once installed the monitoring agents can be updated centrally with multiple agents updated at the same time. There is no need to access the Customers's System on the operating system level.
- Service Providers can delegate almost any functionality or task to their Customers to support multi-tenant operating concepts, for instance in SaaS deployments.