SAP Solution Manager - Solution Concept and Design Introduction to the Solution Concept and discussion of the potential criteria for Solution Tailoring
Table of Contents 1 PREFACE... 2 2 AUDIENCE... 2 3 INTRODUCTION TO THE SOLUTION CONCEPT... 2 4 DEFINING A SOLUTION... 3 5 SAP SOLUTION... 8 1 PREFACE This document describes the life cycle of solutions. The main focus is the limitation of content transfer and common mistakes during the solution design phase. This document is addressed to persons responsible for SAP Solution Manager, as defined by SAP Solution Manager and Application Lifecycle Management services. The content provides decision support for the related decision makers and helps to define a SAP Solution Manager strategy. 2 AUDIENCE The document explains the solution concept and provides guidelines for the solution design in SAP Solution Manager and it is a best practice for consultants and customer architects who design solutions and solution use cases. This paper is for decision makers and persons responsible for and owners of SAP Solution Manager systems. 3 INTRODUCTION TO THE SOLUTION CONCEPT In the last few years, the IT world of SAP customers has grown much more challenging. Instead of one single SAP R/3 system, there are now multiple systems integrated by the flow of business processes involving different SAP Suite products and middleware. Data and process consistency is not provided by one integrated database design but by means of messaging, data, and UI unification. It has become much more challenging to keep track of the entire, integrated system landscape. If there is an incident or a problem, it is much more challenging to judge the relevance of certain activities. This situation has made it essential that SAP customers and SAP Support can rely on a central source of current information on the customer solution and system landscape. In the SAP Solution Manager, a solution is an entity of information consisting of servers, databases, systems, software components, and business scenarios and processes. The solution is a virtual container, where the production business processes and the related systems and software components information are documented. Once a solution is created, the information is available to all operational and optimization services of the SAP Solution Manager. For example, systems can be monitored and service level reports can be created based on monitoring thresholds and service level agreements. Business-process monitoring and interface monitoring can be set up and analyzed by system operation. The setup for the monitoring functions can only be performed within an existing solution with appropriate assignment of the referring logical components. SAP EarlyWatch Alerts and results from service sessions can be reported within the solution context. Issues can be created and tracked in relation to problems that come up during solution operation. 2
Workload analysis, root cause analysis, and transaction traces can be performed to solve incidents or problems within a solution context. However the root cause analysis scenario itself is independent of the solution concept as of SAP Solution Manager 7.0 EhP1. The process structures, process documentation maintained in a solution or taken over from a project, and monitoring data can all be accessed during service deliveries from SAP Active Global Support or during problem resolution (root cause analysis). The solution directory holds the information of all solutions in a SAP Solution Manager system. During handover to production, the SAP Solution Manager project content is copied into the solution directory. The scenarios, processes, process steps, master data, organizational unit structures, and all linked documents, configurations, transactions, test cases, and learning maps are available for solution operations. To manage maintenance and continuous improvement, a maintenance project can be created and linked to a solution. There are two possibilities for changing structures (business scenarios, business processes and business steps) and technical configuration changes, for example maintaining an additional configuration item to a business process step. The latter is performed in the assigned maintenance project on check out/check in. For example, once a process implementation is handed over to operation for the first time, maintenance activities that changes process documentation, configuration, and test cases are managed within a dedicated maintenance project. Whenever a change is requested, all required items are checked out from the solution into the dedicated maintenance project. After changes are deployed to production, items are checked in to the solution. In this way, the solution can be updated in a consistent, safe, efficient and documented manner. 4 DEFINING A SOLUTION A solution is an entity of information about systems, servers, databases, software components, and business processes (business scenarios). A solution has the following properties: 3
Every solution has a leading role as a unique characteristic. A leading role describes which system type, (like production, preproduction, quality assurance, or development) is set as the main characteristic for the solution. The solution has an authorization concept. By means of roles and authorization objects, the access of different users to a solution can be restricted. Solutions are independent from each other. The criteria for solution design, for example, take into account independent organizational or business units, among others. Every solution has a solution life cycle. Starting with implementation project(s), project content can be created and taken over to the operations part (productive use of the solution, that is: for monitoring). Later on, the solution can be used as the basis for ongoing maintenance, new implementations, or upgrades. This means that the current solution content with regard to structures and documentation, and so on, can be handed over to a project by means of the compare and adjust function. Criteria for tailoring a Solution: The solution should reflect a part or the entire company structure in relation to the system landscape and business processes. Depending on the company structure, there can be one or several solutions defined in SAP Solution Manager. The main criteria for deciding how many solutions should be created, and which systems or processes should belong to them, are the size of the customer system landscape, the different use cases of the solution, and performance restrictions. When creating a solution there are several factors to take into account that relate to the solution monitoring scenario. The following factors affect how a solution is tailored: Usually small and midsize customers do not need more than one solution. The number of systems in the solution There are no strict limits for the number of systems a solution may contain, but when including systems into the solution, the load coming from system or business process monitoring must be taken into account, as this influences the system resources usage of SAP Solution Manager. This criterion is described below in the Scenarios section. Another aspect is usability. Complex system landscape with a large number of systems involved in many core business processes is less transparent during monitoring. If there are many monitoring objects that need to be displayed, the graphic display and the monitoring refresh take longer and are more complex. This also applies to the Work Center view. Performance of SAP Solution Manager can be improved by splitting a large and complex solution into several solutions. Organizational units of a company or a corporate group (also their structure, required technical availability, and so on) Another important factor having influence on the number of solutions is the organizational view relevant within a corporation. Individual customer organizations split responsibilities related to systems and processes. Thus, solutions might be defined according to organizational structures such as company structures, business units, support organizations, or regional organizations. As a rule, such units are organizationally independent, including the customer IT departments and possibly also the support centers. In such cases it makes sense to create different solutions. The end-to-end business processes across all involved systems / logical components (also third-party) One of the most important criteria for a solution unit is the integrity of business processes. From a logical point of view it is necessary to have all of the business 4
process steps that are related to the same core business process in one solution. This is especially important if you plan to set up business process monitoring, in order to enable the monitoring of a complete business process within one solution. It is also required for the delivery of SAP Services that analyze business processes (BPPO, SMA, TIC, and so on). One service can only be assigned to one solution, so all necessary business processes and business process steps must be contained in that solution for successful service delivery. The roles of the solutions (technical characteristic) The role criteria are important when planning solution monitoring (SAP EarlyWatch Alert, system monitoring, business process monitoring, and interface monitoring) for non-production systems. Typically, when monitoring is required for non-production systems as well, a separate solution should be defined, that is, a solution for test systems. This approach allows the number of systems included in the monitoring within the production solution to be limited and makes it possible to separate the monitoring data of the production environment from the non-production environment. The same applies for setting up workload analysis for test systems. Scenarios (SAP Solution Manager usage) The use of the different SAP Solution Manager scenarios (for example, solution monitoring or collaboration), should be considered in solution design, since some scenarios may have an impact on data load and on hardware resources required. For details, see Sizing Guide SAP Solution Manager at http://service.sap.com/solutionmanager -> Media Library->Technical Information -> Sizing Guide SAP Solution Manager 7.0 as of SP15. In addition, you can use the SAP Solution Manager 7.1 sizing toolkit at http://service.sap.com/sizing-solman Furthermore, the following function should be considered in solution design, as it may impact system performance and the requirements for hardware resources: o Business process monitoring (number of alerts, monitoring objects and RFCs, limited graphical display capability) Remark: The limited graphical display capability is the main factor decreasing the performance and the usability of the monitoring functions. The performance is driven by the number of business process monitoring alerts that need to be processed. We recommend not having to handle more than 2,000 alerts per five-minute refresh interval within a solution; otherwise the system might take up to a minute to display the alert graphic. The use of cross-solution scenarios like change requests or service desk messages does not have any impact on the solution design, since they are stored in a separate repository and just linked to a solution. Hosting Requirements & Service Providers Hosting provider companies must have separate solutions for each hosted customer (at least one per customer). For more information about ISV and VAR scenarios, refer to the general documentation. Authorization and selection requirements It is usually a requirement that employees working in different business units have different authorizations to access monitoring and functional data. Authorization may even have to be restricted to a certain business process. It may be required that only chosen customer departments can have access to certain data and information available or stored in a solution. Access to solutions in SAP Solution Manager can be controlled directly by authorizations. For example, it is possible to restrict access by user to monitoring landscapes and documents. For further information, refer to the Security Guide (chapter 6 and 7). 5
Solution Concept, Design and Lifecycle Solution Tailoring: The following use cases do not have a significant influence on the solution design: The creation of SAP EarlyWatch Alert (EWA) and service level reports (SLR). It should be noted that having many systems in a solution complicates EWA monitoring, because the evaluation of many check reports is required. The most performancecritical issue is the data download for and processing of EarlyWatch Alert /SLR sessions. This action is typically performed as a batch job at night or at other low system load times. Documentation in the business processes Maintenance Optimizer Root Cause Analysis (RCA) Issue and task tracking via work center UI Use of an implementation scenario. Different projects can be created, maintained, implemented, and tested without impact on a solution. After go-live, project content can be transferred to a solution. Use of a change request management scenario. It is not solution-dependent, but does affect sizing of the SAP Solution Manager system. The related change requests are visible in any solution. Use of a service desk scenario. It is not solution-dependent, but does affect sizing of the SAP Solution Manager system. The related service desk messages are visible in any solution. 6
Solution Design Example: Midsize Company: Solution Type of System Systems Involved Business Operations ECC 6.0 APO BI PRD CPT BWP Solution Design Example: Global Oil Company: Solution Type of System Systems Involved Downstream ECC (n.n IS-Oil) ASB, UEB, ABA, AAJ ECC (n.n IS-Oil) BI (n.n) AS4 A7W Upstream ECC (n.n. mm IS-Oil) GAS, G3A BI (n.n) A2W Chemical ECC (4.6C IS-Oil) G7A APO (3.0A) BW (3.0B) AA9 A9W CRM (3.0A) A7C Retail R/3 (4.6C IS-Retail) G6A, A7G, ACG BW (3.0B) A8W HR R/3 (4.6C) A1G BW (2.0B) A4W GONG ECC 6.0 N/A 7
5 SAP SOLUTION Since SP18, SAP Solution Manager provides a guided procedure for automatic initial basic configuration. One of the most important parts of this guided procedure is setting up a solution called SAP Solution. All defined logical components with a production system role are assigned to this solution in batch mode. Early use of all collaboration, root cause, and support functions for the production system landscape at the customer site is beneficial. The guidance cannot be changed and meets approximately 80% of all customer cases. SAP recommends following this guided configuration and keeping SAP Solution. Generally, if the guided procedure (transaction SOLMAN_SETUP) has been used for automatic initial basic configuration of the SAP Solution Manager system, the system automatically includes in one standard solution (suggested name: SAP Solution) all production systems of the landscape that are known and connected to system administration. This ensures, for example, that you can perform service delivery for all production systems. 8
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