This week, I took a deep dive into Sentinel & SAP— here’s what I learned

I had the chance to dive into Microsoft Sentinel's Limited Preview SAP connector, and I have to say—it was fun.

If you've ever tried integrating SAP with a security monitoring tool, you know the struggle. It's complicated, requires a ton of manual configuration, and, after multiple customer conversation, the one commonality it’s a headache for both security and BASIS teams.

On one hand, you have the security team who want a deeper visibility into their SAP logs. On the other side, you have the BASIS team who are (rightfully) concerned about anything that might slow down or destabilize their systems. In the past, monitoring meant installing agents directly on SAP servers—something that’s not always ideal.

Why SAP Security Is a Challenge

SAP is the backbone of many businesses around the world. It handles finance, HR, and supply chains—basically, all the right data attackers love to target.

But getting real security visibility into SAP has always been tough.

• There’s no easy way to correlate SAP security events with other logs in a SIEM.
• Traditional monitoring solutions require agents on SAP systems, which can cause performance issues.
• SAP logs are complex and not always security-focused, making them difficult to interpret without deep SAP knowledge.

So, many security teams end up flying blind when it comes to SAP, which isn’t ideal.

A New Approach with Sentinel

One thing I love about my role as a Cloud Solutions Architect is the ability to help customers integrate solutions into their Microsoft or third-party environments, thinking about it one of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received is to diversify your understanding of different tools—whether you focus on Azure, AWS, or a specific security solution.

Having a fundamentals understanding of different platforms you know your organization or clients uses and being able to understand how they work together makes a huge impact on how I today can better support our customers, who often operate in diverse and complex digital environments.

So, during my learning period, i found out that Microsoft had released an agentless SAP connector for Sentinel which is in limited preview and the biggest selling point? No more agents.

So, Instead of deploying additional software on your SAP servers, this new Sentinel connector integrates through the SAP Cloud Connector and SAP Integration Suite—tools which many organizations already have in place.

What this means:

• No performance impact on SAP systems
• No additional software to maintain on SAP servers
• Faster, smoother integration between SAP logs and Sentinel

It’s a huge improvement over the old way of doing things.

Setting It Up—What I Learned

I went through the setup process on my demo environment, and here’s what I found:

1. You need the SAP Cloud Connector. If your company doesn’t already use it, that’s step one.
2. Deployment is straightforward. You can find the Sentinel SAP solution in the Sentinel Content Hub.
3. Configuring the connector takes some fine-tuning. SAP logs aren’t security-focused by default, so you’ll want to customize the log sources and alert rules to avoid drowning in unnecessary noise.

It’s not plug-and-play, but it’s a massive improvement over past approaches.

Why This Matters for Security Teams

With this integration, security teams can now:

• Monitor SAP security events in real time, such as suspicious logins, privilege escalations, and unauthorized access.
• Correlate SAP activity with other security data to get a full picture of threats across the environment.
• Automate responses by triggering alerts and actions using Sentinel playbooks.

This closes a huge visibility gap for organizations that rely on SAP.

Lessons Learned

• Work closely with your SAP BASIS team. This integration touches their environment, so bringing them in early will save headaches later.
• Start small. Focus on the most critical security logs first rather than trying to monitor everything from day one.
• Customize alerts. Sentinel is powerful, but raw SAP logs can generate a lot of noise. Tweaking detection rules ensures you’re catching real threats.

If your team has been struggling to integrate SAP into your security monitoring stack, I highly recommend checking this out.

For more details, here’s the official Microsoft/SAP documentation: Microsoft Sentinel for SAP goes agentless - SAP Community , Connect your SAP system to Microsoft Sentinel | Microsoft Learn