Project Trento reaches Ramp-Up phase

Today we are pleased to announce that SUSEs project Trento is reaching the Ramp-Up phase (limited availability) in December where we make the solution available to customers in a staged approach. If you are interested in participating in the Ramp-Up phase and use SUSE Linux Enterprise server for SAP applications, please reach out to trento-project@suse.com to learn more.

In case you are hearing about Project Trento for the first time, please check the official Trento website or watch the first demo video to learn more.

But let me use the opportunity to share a quick summary here as well. SUSE has been the thought leader of the Pacemaker-based High Availability stack for SAP HANA and SAP NetWeaver, publishing a large number of best practice guides on how to configure the HA stack reliably, especially in conjunction with cloud deployments. This has been perceived as complex by SAP system integrators and SAP customers initially. With more and more organizations migrating to SAP HANA as their database or even S/4HANA as their modern ERP solution, they are faced with a huge change of technology in many cases that make it challenging for IT departments to deliver the same service level as in previous SAP versions due to the learning curve of potentially new environments.

Project Trento was born out of the idea to provide these clients an easy to use and consume solution that helps them to validate their High Availability stack before the go-live and during the ongoing operation.

In short, think about Project Trento as the SUSE best practice guides translated into software and rules. Trento runs in the background and runs a number of checks on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications systems to check correct and suggested configuration values against those implemented. If a discrepancy is found, Trento will show the check result and give guidance, even the correct command for copy and paste, to correct the setting. It also distinguishes between warnings and severe configuration problems. Trento not only checks each hosts , it also compares values between cluster members.

The initial version of Trento focuses on the HA configuration checks , helping to safeguard SAP operation and prevent outages due to configuration issues of the environment. We are looking to provide the GA version of Trento around march 2022 for general consumption. Of course we plan to add over time additional more configuration variations.

For the subsequent releases of Trento we are planning to integrate the monitoring project for SAP workloads as part of Trento. Besides the already existing capabilities we intend to fully include log aggregation capabilities based on “Loki” to allow an admin to easily troubleshoot problems in the SAP system by putting several key OS and SAP logs side by side, synched by a timestamp . We are also working on the ability to search logs for specific error messages automatically and show these events inside the Grafana dashboards of the Trento console.

Another key capability customers can expect is an alerting function that triggers alerts to admins based one events that can be defined and adjusted to specific thresholds within the environment. SUSE intends to ship templates that can be adjusted.

And last, but not least, we plan to extend the rule sets within Trento over time, creating rules for key configuration issues we learn about or that customers struggle with, as well as keeping rules for e.g. specific cloud service provider deployments.

We are proud as a team of the customer feedback we have received so far on Trento which is tested since months already by multiple clients who helped us shape Trento to this point. We would be delighted if you find similar value on the project.