SAP Solution Manager

SAP Solution Manager is a product developed by the software company SAP SE. It is an integrated end-to-end platform intended to assist users in adopting new developments, managing the application lifecycle, and running SAP solutions.

Overview

SAP Solution Manager is a central support and system management suite provided to SAP's customers as part of their license agreement. As an SAP system landscape may include a large number of installed SAP and non-SAP systems, SAP Solution Manager is intended to reduce and centralize the management of these systems and end-to-end business processes.

In such a landscape, SAP Solution Manager is the managing system, and the business suite applications (e.g. ERP, CRM, BI, EP) are the managed systems. Non-SAP systems in the landscape can also be covered over the solution life-cycle. Business processes can also be documented during the entire solution lifecycle, making the platform an important business platform as well as an IT platform.

SAP Solution Manager 7.1 provides features for use in the IT Support area for enhancing, automating and improving the management of SAP and non-SAP systems:^[1]

• Solution Implementation and Template Management
• Solution Documentation
• Test Management
• Change Control Management
• IT Service Management
• Application Operations
• Business Process Operations
• Maintenance Management
• Upgrade Management
• Custom Code Management ..

The current version of SAP Solution Manager is SAP Solution Manager 7.1, available since September 2011.Link to SAP Press Release

Support Package Stack 14 for SAP Solution Manager 7.1 was released in October 2015, delivering new innovations for running SAP solutions. Accordingly, the product’s documentation was updated with new release information for SP-stack 14:

SAP Solution Manager 7.1 is the foundation of SAP’s Two Value Releases Per Year best practice, as outlined in the White Paper “Two Value Releases per Year: How IT Can Deliver Releases with Tangible Business Value Every Six Months.”

SAP Solution Manager 7.1 has been verified as ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) compliant in 15 core processes by Pink Elephant.^[2]

• Availability Management
• Capacity Management
• Change Management
• Event Management
• Financial Management
• Incident Management
• IT Service Continuity Management
• Knowledge Management
• Problem Management
• Release & Deployment Management
• Request Fulfillment
• Service Asset & Configuration Management
• Service Catalog Management
• Service Level Management
• Service Portfolio Management

Mobile applications for SAP Solution Manager 7.1 are available for iOS and Android platforms for use with SAP Solution Manager: Mobile Apps for SAP Solution Manager

• SAP Business Process Analytics for iPad (iOS)
• SAP Solution Manager Dashboards for iPad (iOS)
• SAP Incident Management (Android and iOS)
• SAP Change Approval (Android and iOS)
• SAP Job Progress Monitoring (Android and iOS)
• SAP End User Experience Monitoring (Android and iOS)
• SAP System Monitoring (Android and iOS)

Some of the claimed benefits of using SAP Solution Manager 7.1 are that it helps:^[3]

• Support the orchestration of the entire end-to-end customer solution via modeling, change control, IT service management and a robust monitoring and alerting infrastructure
• Provides simple, web-based user interfaces and management dashboards
• Increases efficiency with a new Operations Control Center for central control of critical operations support tasks
• Support the business with business process modeling, reverse business process documentation, and business process usage analysis and analytics
• Provide customers with extended usage rights for support of non-SAP components, included in the customer SAP Enterprise Support contract

The new release of SAP Solution Manager 7.2 is planned for customer availability in 2016, and provides a new solution documentation infrastructure, improved support for hybrid (on-premises and on-cloud) landscapes, as well as new user interfaces based on SAP Fiori. 7.2 can also run on the SAP HANA database as an option for the first time. The SAP Solution Manager Product Roadmap presentation has been updated with more details:

In December 2015, SAP Solution Manager 7.2 became available to ramp-up customers. Accordingly, new training materials were released: as well as an overview video:

In addition, SAP Solution Manager Product Management released a YouTube video announcing that ramp-up of version 7.2 had begun:

More information is also released via Twitter: @SAP_AGS #solmgr.

References

1. Melich, Matthias (2011). SAP Solution Manager (3rd Edition). SAP Press.
2. SAP Solution Manager - ITIL Certified
3. Melich, Matthias (2011). SAP Solution Manager (3rd Edition). SAP Press. p. 25. ISBN 978-1-59229-388-9.

• Marc Schäfer, Matthias Melich: SAP Solution Manager (3rd Edition) SAP Press, 2012, ISBN 978-1-59229-388-9
• Nathan Williams: IT Service Management in SAP Solution Manager SAP Press, 2013, ISBN 978-1-59229-440-4
• Lars Teuber, Corina Weidmann, and Liane Will: Monitoring and Operations with SAP Solution Manager SAP Press, 2014, ISBN 978-1-59229-884-6
• Michael Kloffer, Marc Thier: Performing End-to-end Root Cause Analysis Using SAP Solution Manager SAP Press, 2008, ISBN 1-59229-189-9, ISBN 978-1-59229-189-2