Top 10 reasons why Solman 7.1 is better for hosting partners

[jon_friesen2]

I've been specializing in the niche scenario of supporting SolMan for hosting partners since its introduction.  This is a fascinating use of SolMan because it's the ideal centralized platform for IT automation and streamlining in a hosting environment.  Of course, the frustrations that a typical customer faces in SolMan are magnified a hundredfold when you are supporting hundreds of systems in a Solution Manager.  As SolMan 7.1 is slowly being adopted we've had a chance to get an initial taste of some of the joys and pains of the new architecture.  Here are my top 10 ways that SolMan 7.1 is an improvement to SolMan 7.0 in a hosting environment, as of SP4.

1. Cleaner support of the LongSID (now the “ExtID”) and ability to autogenerate the LongSid
2. Pull instead of push from SLD, and ability to support multiple SLD sources.
3. New monitoring infrastructure supports large-scale load-balancing better than CCMS
4. End-user experience monitoring is much stronger for web monitoring than GRMG was
5. More consistent monitoring of ABAP and Java and other components
6. Easier to switch over to use a QA SolMan during Production outages
7. Auto-patching of host agents and auto-deploy of diagnostics agent content
8. Self-diagnosis and self-monitoring
9. Much easier to centrally adjust thresholds and apply to different customers
10. Less conflict with customer SolMan due to separate configuration of thresholds, notifications

And of course SolMan 7.1 brings with it some new torments for hosting providers, due to the new architecture. But that’s the subject of another blog.