Increase SAP Uptime Using ChatGPT and Splunk

This blog was authored by Roman Lopez, Principal Consultant at RHONDOS.

Leveraging Splunk & OpenAI’s ChatGPT for SAP as a method of increasing uptime might sound crazy. You might be asking yourself what possible ChatGPT use cases haven’t you already read or heard about. If you’re like me, you tried it and were initially amused. Maybe you even used ChatGPT to help you fix a script or query, then the day-to-day demands of modern life pulled your attention away in 10 different directions, and that was that. ?

Totally understandable. That said, there are some key developments in the ChatGPT space that have us very intrigued here at RHONDOS. Our mission at RHONDOS is to “secure and observe SAP like never before,” so we have been working on automating SAP troubleshooting to ultimately increase SAP uptime. So, let’s get into it.?

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Train of Thought & Tree of Thought Techniques?

This concept shook a lot of people’s understanding of how to leverage ChatGPT, as everyone starts using ChatGPT in the same linear fashion: You ask it a question and expect a response – as it if were a genie that was counting each of your wishes, so you’re trying to be frugal – but we can do much, much better. To really tap into ChatGPT’s full intelligence, you must be intelligent about how you pose questions to get better, more refined responses.?

One method called Train of Thought involves having a back-and-forth conversation with ChatGPT and challenging its answers by asking if that’s the best it can do, ask it to explain its answer, or look at the issue from multiple perspectives. By expanding upon the issue, you let ChatGPT use more computational power to provide more robust responses.?

The other method is Tree of Thought. Using prompts, you ask ChatGPT to provide multiple responses to your question and then ask it again to expand on each of those responses, so you end up with a “tree” of ideas. You can ask it to answer the question from multiple points of view and then eliminate the “leaves” of the tree that don’t meet a certain criterion.

If you think about it, this process is similar to how humans tackle complex issues – by entertaining multiple points of view, challenging our ideas and comparing options. Collectively, we’ve been trying to use ChatGPT like it were another Google search, when in reality, it’s more akin to a human method of reasoning.?

These techniques are from a joint whitepaper that came out of Cornell and Google:?

In-Context Learning?

This method is really interesting because as you are using ChatGPT, you can upload knowledge (as .xml, .pdf or table format data) specific to your organization, e.g. CMDB, Major Incidents, support Knowledge Base, and more. This means ChatGPT can have contextual knowledge specific to your needs to enhance the results for your use cases.?

In other words, you are programming AI via prompts and then referring it to that programing in future sessions. How cool is that?! This means ChatGPT can use that structured data and it can apply that data to questions you ask on other related topics without you having to intervene and guide it again to understand the context specific to your organization. ?

For example, I uploaded the Splunk ITSI service tree hierarchy that comes out-of-the-box from the Splunk ITSI Service Intelligence for SAP content pack…?

…So now, ChatGPT has a basic understanding of the basic features of an SAP ABAP system that it can refer to later. Along with this, you can upload specific features of an SAP ABAP landscape, like previous incidents or customizations:?

Plugins?

ChatGPT now has some plugins available to allow it limited access to external data. The plugin that is most interesting to us is the web browsing plugin that allows you to input a URL and have ChatGPT use the web page for context. Say, for example, SAP troubleshooting guides. As of 7/2/23, this plugin has temporarily been disabled, as it was found that it could be used to bypass paywalls, so this feature is currently being reworked.?

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Bringing ChatGPT and IT Service Intelligence Together?

Now, imagine what we can do with these three ChatGPT features to improve uptime across SAP landscapes, specifically if we integrate Splunk ITSI with ChatGPT??

I hope by this point you can feel our excitement behind this RHONDOS plugin currently under development.?

At RHONDOS, we’re using ChatGPT as a monitoring engine to interpret how events correlate by providing the context behind past incidents to allow ChatGPT to assign weight to different possible outcomes.

After some training, we can start feeding it an actual stream of episodes so it can refer to what it has learned about a particular SAP environment in order to tell us what the root cause of an incident is. Effectively, like other RHONDOS SAP solution offerings, this AI-powered troubleshooter will be able to greatly reduce an organization’s time spent on RCA and MTTR.?

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What’s next??

We are currently testing and tuning this solution on select SAP environments. Please reach out if you’d like to be part of this exclusive group.?

About Roman Lopez - [email protected]

Roman Lopez (known as "El Fuego") has been focused on customer innovation with Splunk since v4.3, but his primary focus nowadays are Splunk ITSI implementations for SAP. He holds the Splunk SCCII certification and Splunk ITSI Analyst accreditation, as well as a few IT-related postgraduate degrees.

More from RHONDOS :

• Getting the Most Value Out of Splunk ITSI and SAP
• SAP Monitoring with ChatGPT
• Splunking SAP: A Broad Spectrum of Use Cases (Session)
• SAP Zero Trust Framework Explained