SAP Cloud ALM: The Ideal Starting Point for SAP Cloud Operations and How RHONDOS Extends It for Hybrid Enterprise Landscapes

This article was authored by Brian Bates, Senior Director of GTM Strategy at RHONDOS.

As organizations modernize their SAP® environments, SAP Cloud ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) has become a cornerstone of SAP’s cloud strategy. It provides guided implementation, SAP-native monitoring, and lifecycle operations with no additional licensing cost. For customers adopting S/4HANA Cloud, SAP BTP, or cloud-managed integrations, Cloud ALM represents a fast, intuitive, SAP-aligned way to start operating SAP in the cloud.

However, most Fortune 2000 companies do not run 100% SAP or in a pure cloud model. Landscapes continuously evolve and can span on-premise ECC, S/4HANA on-premise or private cloud, RISE with SAP, Lift-and-shift workloads on AWS, Azure, or GCP, SAP SaaS (SuccessFactors, Ariba, Concur), Custom ABAP extensions, and especially non-SAP systems and multi-cloud integrations across massive, global supply chains.

Cloud ALM excels inside SAP’s cloud ecosystem, but large enterprises require observability, telemetry, and data retention beyond Cloud ALM’s cloud and SAP-centric boundaries.

This blog article explores four themes:

• Why Cloud ALM is an exceptional foundation

• Which limitations matter at enterprise scale

• How to complement Cloud ALM in hybrid environments

• How to architect full observability across mixed IT landscapes

Why Cloud ALM Is the Right Foundation for SAP Cloud Operations

Included Value with Rapid Time-to-Adoption: Cloud ALM is included with SAP Enterprise Support, giving organizations immediate access to modern ALM capabilities without procurement or licensing hurdles.

Built for SAP’s Clean Core and Cloud Strategy: Cloud ALM delivers the visibility SAP wants customers to use

• Health Monitoring

• Integration & Exception Monitoring

• Real User & Synthetic Monitoring

• Job & Automation Monitoring

• SAP Activate Roadmaps

• Deployment orchestration for SAP cloud services

Strong SAP-Centric Visibility: Cloud ALM provides deep, content-driven visibility for:

• SAP cloud services

• SAP-managed integrations

• SAP SaaS applications

• SAP BTP services

It is the most SAP-native approach to cloud-era operations, and for S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, Cloud ALM is the preferred operational model.

Where Enterprise Scale Introduces Nuance

I've been working with many household name brands over the last several years, and have started to observe a common theme. Fortune 2000 organizations are finding the out-of-the-box capabilities of Cloud ALM acceptable for an initial implementation for cloud monitoring strategy but quickly encounter limitations when using Cloud ALM as an all-encompassing observability platform, mainly because it wasn’t designed to be one. I've listed out six of the most important technical boundaries that have come up recently.

1. Custom Metrics Are Supported, but Not Turnkey Across All Systems

Cloud ALM supports custom metrics via the Raw Data Inbound API, but:

• Not all NetWeaver-based systems have native collectors

• On-prem and private cloud systems require custom development or manual scheduled jobs

• No universal ABAP BAdI exists across all hosting models

Enterprise impact: Custom metrics require engineering effort before Cloud ALM can ingest them.

2. Data Retention Is Limited (by Design)

Cloud ALM retention ceilings include:

• Raw: ~180 days

• Hourly: ~365 days

• Daily: ~720 days

• Integration messages: often ~14 days

Enterprise impact: This is sufficient for operational monitoring, but not for, forensics, multi-year capacity modeling, compliance, or long-term performance analysis.

3. Alerting Requires Significant Tuning

Defaults can be noisy. Alert thresholds must be tuned carefully:

• AI-based delay features help, but do not eliminate noise

• High-volume systems generate alert fatigue if filters are not refined

• Alert governance frameworks (severities, routing, escalation) must be built

Enterprise impact: A solid baseline is provided, but the enterprise will need to budget and plan for tuning and customization implementation.

4. Filtering Is Critical... and Can be Easy to Get Wrong

Cloud ALM can over-collect or under-collect without proper filters.

Common issues include:

• Too much data → memory/load challenges

• Too little data → missed events

• Value-help lists disappear when older messages are purged

Enterprise impact: This makes governance essential.

5. Non-SAP and Cross-Platform Observability Is Not Native

Cloud ALM supports non-SAP systems only through APIs that are not deep, turnkey connectors.

Enterprises still require observability into:

• Kubernetes & containers

• Network & infrastructure

• Non-SAP integration layers

• Security & identity analytics

• Application performance tracing

• SIEM platforms

• Multi-cloud telemetry

Enterprise impact: Cloud ALM is SAP-centric by design - not an enterprise-wide observability platform.

6. Cloud ALM API Throughput, Size, and Fair-Use Limits

One of the lesser known details about the reality in operationalizing Cloud ALM are its APIs constraints:

• 100 requests per minute max

• 5 MB max per request

• 1,000–5,000 records per response

• 8 GB/month outbound API data limit

• 256-character field length

• Up to 200 time series per export

Enterprise impact: API-based integrations must be carefully architected to avoid hitting these ceilings, but what's more realistic is that the free Cloud ALM stack will not be sufficient for large and XL+ landscapes.

Cloud ALM Is Cloud-Centric while Enterprises Are Hybrid

Cloud ALM is optimized for SAP cloud services. But most global enterprises operate SAP across:

• On-premise datacenters

• Private cloud

• RISE with SAP (SAP-managed hosting)

• Hyperscalers using BYOL licensing

• Hybrid custom ABAP environments

Cloud ALM extends into these areas, but not with the depth or flexibility required for:

• Deep ABAP telemetry

• Real-time security analytics

• Kernel-level performance events

• Cross-hosting consistency

• High-volume extraction

This is where RHONDOS and PowerConnect fundamentally change the picture.

How PowerConnect Complements Cloud ALM in Hybrid SAP Landscapes

In today’s increasingly hybrid SAP environments, organizations need visibility that stretches across on-premise systems, private clouds, hyperscalers, and RISE with SAP deployments. Cloud ALM offers value for lifecycle management, but it wasn’t designed to handle the full depth, scale, and diversity of telemetry produced by complex SAP estates. This is where PowerConnect becomes an essential complement.

PowerConnect is an SAP-certified NetWeaver add-on for ECC and S/4HANA that reaches deep into the ABAP layer to extract distinct, customer-specific technical, functional, performance, and security log transactions generate. In parallel to Cloud ALM’s API framework, PowerConnect streams these events directly into your enterprise SIEM, observability stack, or analytics platform, giving SAP a first-class presence in environments where the rest of the enterprise is already being monitored.

One of PowerConnect’s defining strengths is its universality. Because it runs natively on all SAP NetWeaver systems, it works consistently across every hosting model: traditional on-premise ECC systems, on-premise S/4HANA, S/4HANA Private Cloud Edition, RISE with SAP, BYOL cloud deployments on AWS, Azure, or GCP, and even mixed-mode or multi-region SAP landscapes. Cloud ALM operational capabilities are augmented with this breadth of support across complex, heterogeneous environments.

Another major advantage is that PowerConnect operates without API constraints. Since it doesn’t rely on Cloud ALM’s delivery mechanisms, it avoids all the common limits that Cloud ALM enforces—no 100-requests-per-minute ceiling, no 5 MB payload restrictions, no 1,000–5,000 record cap, no 8 GB monthly data budget, and no OData throttling. PowerConnect collects and streams SAP telemetry in near real time, at enterprise scale, without bottlenecks because the data needed to complete the picture is high-fidelity and high-frequency.

This depth of data becomes especially powerful for security operations. Cloud ALM is not a security product, but PowerConnect enables real-time SAP security monitoring by feeding native SAP security events directly into SOC tools. This supports threat detection, SOD monitoring, privilege abuse identification, identity correlation, and forensic investigations—turning SAP from a blind spot into an actively monitored component of the enterprise security posture.

In this way, PowerConnect and Cloud ALM are not competitors, they are complementary tools. Cloud ALM supports lifecycle and operations workflows within the SAP ecosystem, while PowerConnect ensures the entire SAP stack is fully observable, fully monitored, and fully measurable within the broader enterprise landscape.

How RHONDOS Bridges the Gap Between Cloud ALM and Enterprise Observability

RHONDOS specializes in hybrid SAP observability architectures where Cloud ALM, PowerConnect, and enterprise tooling form a cohesive solution.

RHONDOS expertise includes:

• Integrating Cloud ALM across hybrid SAP environments

• Extending Cloud ALM into on-prem and private cloud systems

• Mapping Cloud ALM metrics into SIEM and observability stacks

• Reducing alert fatigue with tuned thresholds and filters

• Architecting API-efficient data flows within Cloud ALM limits

• Deploying PowerConnect across any NetWeaver system

• Creating unified dashboards combining Cloud ALM + PowerConnect + SIEM data

• Ensuring SAP is fully represented in ITSM, SecOps, and observability platforms

The result:

A unified operational model where:

• Cloud ALM = SAP-centric operational excellence

• PowerConnect = real-time enterprise observability & security for SAP

• RHONDOS = architecture, integration, and operational maturity

Together, they provide the comprehensive monitoring, analytics, and security coverage required by Fortune 2000 companies.

Conclusion: Cloud ALM Is the Foundation. PowerConnect and RHONDOS Build the Enterprise Platform on Top.

SAP Cloud ALM is the best place to start your SAP cloud operations journey. It is modern, SAP-native, and cloud-aligned. But enterprise environments are hybrid, distributed, and mission critical. By extending Cloud ALM with:

• PowerConnect’s deep, hosting-agnostic telemetry, and

• RHONDOS’ hybrid architecture expertise,

organizations achieve a powerful, future-proof model:

• SAP cloud visibility through Cloud ALM

• Hybrid/on-premise visibility through PowerConnect

• Cross-enterprise observability, security, and analytics through SIEM, logs, and big data platforms

• A unified operational framework built by RHONDOS, and AI-ready

This is the monitoring architecture Fortune 2000 companies need. One that respects SAP’s strategy, leverages SAP’s modern tooling, and fills the operational gaps required for enterprise-scale governance and resiliency.

Let’s talk - Request a Demo Here.