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What Is SAP Solution Manager And What It Does

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What is the SAP Solution Manager: The SAP Solution Manager is the platform that integrates all content, tools and methodologies for the technical implementation and operation of mySAP.com e-business solutions. It helps customers to manage their entire mySAP.com solution landscape, including interfaces to third-party systems with a focus on core business processes. The SAP Solution Manager consists of an operations area for ordering and performing services, a solution monitoring section and a support area for activities such as SAP Note search and automatic implementation.
The SAP Solution Manager integrates in one platform:
  • System monitoring (real time)
  • Business process monitoring (real time)
  • Service level management (SLM Reporting)
  • Access to Best Practices for mySAP.com (service procedures / documents)
  • Proactive and predictive services for optimization and maintenance over the entire lifecycle (Feasibility >> Integration >> GoingLive >> EarlyWatch >> Conversion >> Upgrade)
  • Support desk with integrated messaging for user support (full range help desk functionality with ongoing integration into mySAP Customer Relationship Management (mySAP CRM) and a defined interface to SAP Support)
  • Remote support (desktop application sharing and service data transfer)
What Does the SAP Solution Manager Do?
The SAP Solution Manager enables customers to technically implement and efficiently operate their mySAP.com e-business solution. With the SAP Solution Manager customers can graphically map their solution landscape with a focus on the core business processes thus identifying how non-SAP systems are involved in the individual steps of the identified core business processes in order to proactively avoid interface problems.

Fully integrated into SAP Enterprise Portals, the SAP Solution Manager monitors core business processes over the entire system landscape. Alerts are displayed graphically in the mapped solution landscape. Its monitoring functions offer constant, centralized information about the current status of each system in the entire solution landscape.

As a central service and support platform, the SAP Solution Manager supplies customers with Self-Services. It automatically generates customer-specific services that are specially defined for the customer’s mySAP.com solutions taking into account all elements and system configuration. The SAP Solution Manager therefore enables customers to avoid problems in advance and facilitates such tasks as backups, archiving, and upgrades. With its built-in support desk, the SAP Solution Manager helps customers to set up an efficient internal support service that is tightly integrated with SAP’s support organization.

1. Operations Area.
In the Operations area of the SAP Solution Manager, customer-specific services and Best Practices for Solution Management are automatically generated. These services comprise remote services, Self-Services, on-site services and Best Practice documents. All services and Best Practices can be ordered via the SAP Solution Manager. The Operations area gives a clear overview of all customer-specific service recommendations, of all services that have been performed and the systems in which they have been performed. The results of each service are available in the form of detailed reports in either Microsoft Word or HTML.

Predictive and Proactive Services
SAP's predictive and proactive services safeguard the entire customer life cycle. Feasibility studies focus on integration, operation and risk management and lead to a smooth implementation and continuous operation. During the technical implementation, the SAP GoingLive Check takes care of supporting and auditing the startup of operations, while the SAP EarlyWatch service assures continuous operation and optimization of the solution. Most of these services are part of the SAP maintenance contract and are available without additional charge. Whether the service is delivered by SAP, partners or by customers themselves depends on each specific situation

Continuous Improvement Services – Optimizing the Business Process
Complex situations can be unique to one customer and require special solutions. With years of experience in such situations, SAP has developed services for continuous improvement. These services help customers to identify potential problems in their mySAP.com solutions and are delivered by on-site teams of experienced SAP consultants. For example, the Solution Management Review services analyze core business processes and identify issues that affect the normal flow of the core business process. 

A range of Solution Management Optimization services, which focus on specific critical weak points of solution management, is then available to solve these problems. Depending on the service, the service may be performed on-site or remotely from SAP. Due to the special skills required to deliver services, SAP offers training courses and certification programs.

Best Practice Documents
Best Practice Documents for Solution Management add to the existing product family of SAP’s Best Practice service offerings. SAP’s experience with implementation and operation of existing and newly developed solutions are the basis of these documents.
The intention is to provide important and meaningful information as fast as possible to all relevant parties – SAP, partners, and customers – and keeping this information up-to-date. If possible, SAP creates semi-automatic service procedures, which make the realization of the procedures in the Best Practices easier.

2. Solution Monitoring Area
The SAP Solution Manager contains a Solution Monitoring area that not only covers system monitoring but also addresses Business Process Monitoring and Service Level Management in order to enable the customer to monitor and administer the entire solution. Customer experts receive help faster and are boosted in managing critical software and operation problems. The solution monitoring concept of the SAP Solution Manager provides world-class services proven for SAP R/3 (SAP EarlyWatch, SAP GoingLive Check, conversion services) and also available for the full range of mySAP.com solutions.

If necessary, a special interface allows alerts coming from the Solution Monitoring area in the SAP Solution Manager to be sent to mobile devices such as cellular phones or personal digital assistants.

Real time monitoring can only be managed using push-functionality from all connected satellite systems. The SAP Solution Manager works together with the existing monitoring tool CCMS (Computer Center Management System) to define threshold values for components, functions and interfaces. Depending on the values defined, agents and collectors are triggered to monitor process steps and system behavior.

Business Process Monitoring
In the area Business Process Monitoring, the SAP Solution Manager focuses on the business side of the solution by providing process oriented monitoring of the most critical business processes of a company. This includes all monitoring activities of technical and business application specific functions. The goal is to detect critical situations related to business processes as soon as possible and then enable the customer’s support organization to react quickly. The SAP Solution Manager contains the appropriate services and/or Best Practices to solve the problem.

Business Process Monitoring covers:
  • Business application logs (such as application log, due list log)
  • Interfaces for data transfer between software components
  • Job scheduling management
  • Technical infrastructure and software components
  • Performance key figures
  • Execution of periodic monitoring tasks
Since Business Process Monitoring requires a detailed understanding of the customer's business and the process flow throughout the entire solution landscape, the SAP Solution Manager is an indispensable tool. Once the SAP Solution Manager has been set up for a customer's individual needs, the customer's support organization uses Business Process Monitoring to handle alerts and clearly define problem resolution procedures.

System Monitoring
System Monitoring within the SAP Solution Manager is integrally linked to the new configurable CCMS. All solution components can now be included in the monitoring process without the underlying SAP Basis System like Internet Transaction Server (ITS). System Monitoring is also embedded in the business process flow and allows easy graphical navigation to all kinds of information. Different views on different levels are available and system availability as well as interface errors can be detected immediately.

Service Level Management
Service Level Management (SLM) involves using proactive methodology and procedures to ensure that adequate levels of service are delivered to all IT users in accordance with business priorities at an acceptable cost. Best Practice documents guide customers to form SLM teams and document user requirements in a service level agreement (SLA) made between the business process owners and the IT department. These teams also establish the intervals for service level reporting (SLR), which communicates the ongoing levels of compliance with the SLA. Various key performance indicators (KPI’s) have to be defined and set up in the SAP Solution Manager to be monitored and reported.

Monitoring functions include:
• System (overview and history):
  • System availability and performance
  • Database performance (overview)
  • Hardware capacity
  • Configuration parameter changes
  • Program errors
  • Update errors
  • Database space management
  • ITS availability and performance
  • Passwords of standard users
• Applications:
  • Expensive SQL statements
  • Performance for dedicated transactions
  • Update errors for dedicated transactions
  • Software changes: overview and history
  • Monitoring of background jobs
• Interfaces:
  • Interface (ALE, tRFC, qRFC) errors: overview and history
Service Level Management is the reporting framework within the SAP Solution Manager and contains the following:
  • Display of the SAP EarlyWatch Alert (EWA) results for all systems in a solution landscape, both by component and by business process
  • Showing, hiding and maintaining threshold values for EWA results
  • Inclusion of SAP components such as SAP ITS, SAP liveCache, and external components such as catalog software, Clarify, Commerce One
  • Automatic recommendations for SAP services
  • Graphical representation of series of events
  • Graphical representation of the results in a component view and a business process view
  • Statistical functions such as correlation analysis
3. Support Area
Within the Support area, the SAP Solution Manager offers a complete infrastructure for organizing and operating a solution-wide help desk organization. In addition to message handling and access to the SAP Notes Database as well as other SAP Service Marketplace information, the Support Area integrates support tools such as the SAP Note Assistant and Microsoft NetMeeting.

SAP Support Desk
If errors occur, any user in a mySAP.com solution can post error messages into a special help desk system at the customer site. The posted messages will also appear in the corresponding area of the SAP Solution Manager, which is called the SAP Support Desk. Through the SAP Support Desk, help desk employees have access to a fully integrated message handling system with a full range of features for solving error messages. These capabilities include notes search, access to the customer’s solution database (SAP) and an automatic data collector which captures important system data such as transaction, release, support package level, and database version.

The SAP Support Desk has a direct connection to SAP, which enables help desk employees to forward a problem message to SAP’s support organization. Changed status information is transferred directly into the customer's SAP System; so other interfaces like SAPNet - R/3 Frontend are no longer required.

SAP Note Assistant (Automatic SAP Note Implementation)
If a customer problem requires the implementation of an SAP Note with a code correction, then the SAP Note Assistant speeds up this process by changing the entire process for the automatic implementation of ABAP code. It is no longer necessary to request license keys from the SAP Service Marketplace. The implementation of the SAP Note is recorded and checked for dependencies such as system releases, pre-implemented SAP Notes. Automatically recorded transport requests enable the customers to easily transport every change from a test system throughout the entire system landscape.

SAP Remote Support
Delivery of remote support means that SAP experts connect remotely to a customer system. Remote support used to be provided via dial-up connections or across leased lines, but SAP has recently been able to offer a more cost-effective alternative through the Internet. To achieve the high level of security that is essential for Internet communications, two different encryption methods are in use: secure network communications (SNC) via SAProuter software to deliver software encryption and virtual private networks (VPN) that provide hardware-level encryption.

To optimize remote support, the SAP Solution Manager integrates the application- and desktop-sharing tool Microsoft NetMeeting. With NetMeeting, support professionals from the SAP’s support organization can track complex situations in the customer’s applications.
Sidhika is a computer technology professional, educator with experience in the information technology. She works in a multi-disciplinary role that combines IT Infrastructure, SAP Functional and Network Management. If you like this post, Please leave a comment.

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Comments (6)

bobo said on January 21, 2013 at 3:39 AM

Thank you for this valuable information regarding SAP support packs and sap support pack stacks. I must say that the marketplace is a great and convenient platform.
Unknown said on December 7, 2015 at 10:29 PM

I have read your blog and i got a very useful and knowledgeable information from your blog.You have done a great job.
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