Best Practice 21.3 - Implement sustainability monitoring for infrastructure and SAP - SAP Lens

Best Practice 21.3 - Implement sustainability monitoring for infrastructure and SAP

Monitoring and reporting on the sustainability of SAP workloads in the AWS Cloud provides a crucial feedback mechanism. Such monitors indicate how suggestions you’ve implemented translate into quantifiable changes over time. This data also feeds into the sustainability reporting that will be delivered to shareholders, regulators, and sustainability-minded customers. Reports using the metrics discussed in BP 21.1 (for example, cost and usage as proxy metrics) can demonstrate improvements made in the operational sustainability of your SAP landscape. This can demonstrate that you are successfully achieving the goals set by your overall corporate sustainability strategy.

Suggestion 21.3.1 - Develop sustainability-centric monitoring and reporting

Monitoring is vital to understanding the impact of changes applied to your SAP workloads to improve their overall sustainability. Establish a mechanism to monitor the sustainability of your AWS Cloud consumption based on common, standardized metrics. The AWS Customer Carbon Footprint Tool can be used to estimate the carbon emissions of AWS products and services that underlie your SAP systems. Greenhouse gas emissions are converted to the amount of carbon dioxide that would result in equivalent warming and are denoted by the services to which they are associated. Given that this reporting is AWS account-specific, separating your SAP systems into separate accounts from other workloads might be necessary to achieve the maximum benefits of the tool. That being said, a multi-account strategy is typically based on the security requirements of your organization, so refer to the SAP Lens security pillar guidance on this topic.

SAP also provides their SAP Sustainability Control Tower solution to expand reporting beyond the underlying SAP infrastructure costs to infrastructure costs and ultimately the overall business’s sustainability posture.

Suggestion 21.3.2 - Periodically baseline and review reported results

As described in Suggestion 21.1.1, progress of an organization’s sustainability initiative over time should be based on an initial reference position. As part of setting up the relevant sustainability monitoring tools, establish the baseline configuration data and reporting, from which progress will be tracked. Baselining should include the following considerations:

  • Tagging of relevant SAP workloads to allow for more granular reporting.

  • Current carbon dioxide-equivalent (CO2e) or other proxy metric for workloads running in AWS.

To ensure your organization’s use of AWS services for SAP and their sustainability trajectory are monitored against established KPIs and overall business goals, establish a periodic reporting review as part of an improvement process. This review should include the following activities:

  • Validate all relevant SAP workloads are being monitored appropriately, including new workloads added since data gathering was last baselined.

  • Measure the results, look for gaps, and replicate areas of success.

Aligning these activities with the best practices from the SAP Lens operational excellence pillar can help you perform standardized sustainability reviews with other periodic operational activities. For example, discovering and removing unused resources, such as orphaned storage volumes or low-utilization instances, should be standard operational review tasks that also reduce environmental impact.