Rest in peace SAP SolMan 7.0, now with SolMan 7.1 SP Stack 10 we can finally say this. But the SolMan 7.0 and even 4.0 are still haunting us, heavily. I’ve seen SolMan 7.1 presentations where audience still gets the same sad message as before. “ SolMan is a great tool for monitoring your SAP availability and that sort and you can easily drown in hundreds of alerts. Even more directly it is just a great tool for techies but now it just eats more resources than before” .
Everyone who knows me, knows that I like cooking, especially those Italian flavors. If you are using your SolMan only for the basic monitoring like system availability and CPU usage, it is like you are sitting in front of your fridge and watching the Power on-light and temperature indicator. This could get boring in the long run. So why not open the fridge and explore all the goodies that SAP provides to your SolMan for “free”. On the top-shelf you can find the certified ITIL processes (link) which no other ITSM-tool has to offer for your entire SAP landscape and even non-SAP. Then there are other great SolMan functionalities which are just waiting for you to pick them up and start using them. In one shelf you have the Business Process Change Analyzer to build your test cases and scope to the actual what is changing. Then on a shelf just below that you can find Solution Documentation Assistant and Reverse Business Process Documentation to build, validate and update your solution documentation. Project & Test management tools now with Project Portfolio and Resource Management might come handy and Automated Testing is always fruitful. Change Management fills up a huge shelf with all the functional and technical assets to support the ITIL-certified end-to-end Change process.
Then we come to the monitoring part of the fridge and there are tools for every layer and application of your SAP landscape (link). With the right tools implemented I can check if I’m out of milk, do I have enough butter, what is the date in my yoghurt. My kids can see if there is chocolate pudding for the whole weekend. My wife can check the vegetable-situation.
Different users, different needs, one easily accessible tool. Just open the door. Everything is available and internally integrated together just like in ERP.
One might ask why do I need SolMan in my SAP landscape or why do I need to implement the monitoring tools which I don’t need on a daily basis. Without SolMan correctly connected to your every SAP application it is like walking around in your kitchen with your eyes closed and trying to remember where everything was. Then finding your table only after you have hit it with your foot and to close your eyes again and hitting to the chair right after that. And now one might ask why do I need a SolMan if my hosting partner has had a non-SAP monitoring tool for years which is doing the monitoring somewhere. Now you are walking in your kitchen eyes closed and in the best case scenario after hitting the table you will get an alert notification within minutes after that but usually you will get an email the next day or never saying to you that you’ve found your table.
In the not so good old days the SolMan was installed into a shoe box and with two simultaneous users it would panic and crash. So how much does your SolMan need resources? That depends on your SAP landscape, number of instances and the number of SolMan functionalities which you will use. In our experience you can run a multi-functional SolMan in a large global SAP landscape, multiple SAP applications and hundreds of SolMan-users with a 32GB of memory, up-to-date CPU type of server. Today the phone in your pocket has 64GB of memory, a 64-bit multi-core CPU that can do about gazillion operations in one millisecond and display it in 4K…
Just open the door!
Blog writer Ari Varjonen was born with a SolMan-spoon in his mouth and now with his team of SolMan-experts, he is changing the world project by project. He idolizes Sikke Sumari and her down-to-earth-italian-country-style-cooking.
