Optimizing your SAP landscape requires foresight and a proactive mindset. Today's best practice is to anticipate issues and opportunities before they impact your business.
SAP EarlyWatch Alert is built to change exactly that. Included with SAP Enterprise Support, it delivers weekly analytical insights across your entire SAP landscape — on-premise, cloud, and hybrid — to keep your systems reliable, high-performing, and operationally efficient throughout your cloud transformation and beyond.
The real value comes from how you use the service as part of your day-to-day operations. This guide shows you what SAP EarlyWatch Alert can do — and how to build the habits that let you proactively benefit from it.
This blog is organized around a practical schedule — from on-demand notifications for urgent issues, through monthly alert reviews and quarterly capacity and performance checks, to targeted actions before and after software updates. Each section tells you what to look for, how to interpret the results, and what to do next.
New to SAP EarlyWatch Alert? Watch the overview video first — it sets the context for everything covered in this best practice recommendation.
Step 1: Getting Started: Your Entry Point in SAP for Me
Open SAP for Me, navigate to Services & Support, and head to the Diagnostics tab.
From here, you have access to SAP EarlyWatch Alert key tools:
- SAP EarlyWatch Alert WorkspaceThe central hub providing a consolidated view of landscape health, including stability, configuration, hardware utilization, and performance.
- SAP EarlyWatch Solution Finder Consolidates and prioritizes findings across your system landscape with severity-based alerts, recommendations, and full-text search.
- SAP EarlyWatch Alert Reports Provide transparent, consolidated health insights for each system.
- SAP EarlyWatch Alert Dashboard Provides technical KPIs with up to four years of history and detailed drill-down capabilies.
- SAP EarlyWatch Alert Status App Shows transmission and processing details for your systems at SAP.
The Diagnostics tab also provides a One Click Subscription of Notification.
Step 2: Your Best Practice Schedule
Recommended Schedule
- On Demand: React immediately to urgent notification emails.
- Weekly: Review newly reported findings.
- Monthly: Review the complete alert list and address outstanding findings.
- Quarterly: Assess system capacity and optimize application performance.
- Before Updates: Gather required SAP Notes and patches.
- After Upgrades or Conversions: Compare performance indicators and investigate regressions.
💡Tip: Set up recurring calendar appointments for all review activities before anything else.
Step 3: Your Best Practice Tasks
React Immediately to Urgent Notification Emails
Set Up Notifications
- Open the Diagnostics tab
- Click One Click Subscription of Notification
- Select your view
- Subscribe to all relevant scenarios.
SAP recommends activating the following notifications:
Alerts – Decisive Red (New Decisive Red Alert)
The most critical alert category. Use the notification link to navigate directly to the affected report section, assess relevance, and identify stakeholders.
No Current Service Report
Data from your system has been missing for two weeks.
- On-premise: investigate your infrastructure.
- SAP Private Cloud and SAP Public Cloud: open a service request on component PCO-OPS-TOO-SOL.
SAP HANA Table Records – Critical Tables
SAP HANA Main Memory Forecast
Severe Slowdowns
Triggered when end users are affected by unusually high response times.
Ask:
- What happened during that period?
- Which time component increased most?
- Is there a correlation with CPU or memory utilization?
- Is SAP support or partner involvement required?
💡Tip: Add a Weekly Review
Notification subscriptions highlight the most critical situations but do not cover every new red or yellow finding.
Schedule a short weekly review of the SAP EarlyWatch Alert apps to identify new findings early and monitor emerging trends. In most cases, this review takes only a few minutes. When performed consistently, this review usually takes only a few minutes because you only need to assess findings that have appeared since the previous week.
Once per Month, Review the Complete Alert List
Create views and filters for your team's working scope — for example:
- System IDs
- Alert categories
- New alerts only
Review each alert, understand the associated risks, and follow the recommendations.
Figure 1: Solution Finder is the recommended entry point for reviewing and managing SAP EarlyWatch Alert findings across your landscape.
💡Tip: Use Hide and Snooze for findings that are not currently actionable.
Once per Quarter, Assess System Capacity and Optimize Application Performance
The SAP EarlyWatch Alert Dashboard provides up to four years of history and supports long-term capacity planning and trend analysis.
Figure 2: The Dashboard provides long-term trends for CPU, memory, and storage consumption to support proactive capacity planning.
Review the following KPI tiles in sequence:
- HANA CPU Rating: check whether your processing capacity is sufficient.
- CPU Utilization by Application: see what is driving the load.
- Memory Rating: identify if your system is approaching its memory limits.
- Memory Area: to understand how that memory is distributed.
- Top Tables: monthly to identify rapidly growing tables as early warning signal for future capacity needs
The following memory components contribute to table-related memory consumption:
- Row Store
- Column Store
- NSE Buffer Cache
- Persistent Memory / Fast Restart Option
Click on a specific hourly bar to access and check the size Column Store Tables.
Finally, review
- Database Size on Disk: to monitor overall storage growth and
- Application Server CPU Rating: to confirm the workload is balanced across hosts.
Reviewing these tiles over a minimum 12-month period gives you a reliable, end-to-end picture of your system's sizing needs.
Use the Data Foodprint Forecast to ensure the memory is not running towards the limit within the next 12 months. The column store for the Data Footprint contains Column Store, NSE Buffer Cache, and Fast Restart Option.
💡Tip: Not Every Capacity Trend Requires Additional Hardware
Before investing in additional capacity, evaluate optimization opportunities. Consider upcoming projects, business growth, and workload forecasts before making sizing decisions. Capacity planning should be a recurring team discussion, ensuring that findings are reviewed, priorities are aligned, and actions are taken before risks become critical.
Targeted optimization efforts and prioritizing high-impact improvements helps improve application performance and user experience.
Quick Wins from the Solution Finder:
- Filter for alert category Performance → SQL Statements to find missing SAP HANA indexes.
- Search for the alert title Problematic SQL Statements with a red rating — forward the details to your development team.
For missing indexes, follow the SAP Note recommendations and forward them to your development team for resolutions. For Problematic SQL Statements, your development team should analyze the flagged statements, optimize the SQL, and confirm the improvement in the next SAP EarlyWatch Alert cycle.
Systematic pattern analysis in the Dashboard
Navigate to the Application Server section and drill into Top Transactions ( SAP GUI ) and Top OData Requests (Fiori apps). Select the them and review their time charts. Look for the following patterns, understand what they may indicate, and take the recommended action.
- Upward trend across many apps: Potential system-wide bottleneck; What to do: Check CPU and memory usage in the capacity tiles — consider involving SAP or a partner
- Upward trend in a single app: Growing dataset causing increasingly expensive SQL; What to do: Work with your development team to review and optimize the affected application
- Stepwise increase after an upgrade: Known issue – so check SAP Notes or contact developers; What to do: Search for related SAP Notes or trigger next steps
- Monthly up/down pattern: Application behavior or overall system load correlation; What to do: Monitor over the next quarter before acting — no immediate intervention needed
Before updates, gather required SAP Notes and patches.
Before any software update, use Solution Finder and search for the following terms:
- Hotnews: High-risk SAP Notes relevant to your landscape, with prerequisites pre-checked — and detection of whether data loss or inconsistencies have already occurred
- Side effect: Side Effect Notes that resolve unintended issues introduced by a previously implemented SAP Note
- rtcctool: All updates needed for the latest recommendations
- upgrade: Tailored recommendations for upgrading specific software components
For each result, review the relevance to your system, implement mandatory patches and notes before starting the update, and confirm that all prerequisites are met. Documenting the implemented notes and patches will also provide a valuable baseline for post-upgrade regression analysis.
After upgrades or conversions, compare performance indicators and investigate regressions.
The Event Statistics App automatically detects
- SAP product upgrades, and
- SAP S/4HANA conversions.
Response times are compared automatically and visualized in a bar chart covering the eight weeks following the event.
Identify regressions by task type and navigate directly to the SAP EarlyWatch Alert Dashboard to analyze specific transactions or OData services that may be affected.
💡Tip: Connect Your Pre-Production System
With at least eight weeks of historical data before the upgrade, regressions can often be identified in pre-production before reaching production.
Step 4: Stay Connected
- Product enhancements
- Best practices
- Expert insights
- New Service Content.
Other blogs you might be interested in
- Celebrating the Successful Launch of Joule in SAP for Me
- SAP EarlyWatch Alert: UI Refresh for Improved Readability and Usability
- Big News: What’s New in the SAP for Me Services & … – SAP Community
- 2905076 – S-user ID authorizations required for SAP EarlyWatch applications -SAP for Me
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