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Former Member

The document explains in detail the concept of Service Availability Management and how to achieve it through SAP Solution Manager.

Introduction

The concept of Service Availability Management emerged from the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). ITIL is a set of practices for IT service management (ITSM) that focuses on combining IT services with the needs of business. Availability management allows organizations to sustain the IT service-availability to support the business at a reasonable cost. Availability management addresses the ability of an IT component to perform at an agreed level over a period of time. Availability of  Service to the customer of business organization can be done through Service desk(IT Service Desk) and Service Level Agreement(SLA).

The service desk is one of the ITIL function and is primarily associated with the Service Operation lifecycle stage. Tasks include handling incidents and requests, and providing an interface for other ITSM processes. Primary purposes of a service desk include:

  • Incident Control: life-cycle management of all service requests
  • Communication: keeping a customer informed of progress and advising on workarounds

A service-level agreement(SLA) is an agreement between two or more parties, where one is the customer and the others are service providers. This can be a legally binding formal or an informal "contract"

SAP Solution Manager

SAP Solution Manager 7.1 is the first fully verified ITIL tool in the world.

SAP Solution Manager has been re-certified from PinkVERIFY to comply with all of the 15 ITIL processes that are currently available for certification. Also the German company SERVIEW has given their award called "SERVIEW Certified Tool" to SAP

  • 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

Availability Management

Availability Management in SAP Solution Manager is a framework for monitoring and alerting combined with a data warehouse solution, namely the SAP Business Warehouse. This leads to a combination of Availability Management and Event Management.

The monitoring and alerting infrastructure in SAP Solution Manager provides the functionality to monitor the availability not only of all relevant Configuration items such as applications or Infrastructure for both SAP and non-SAP, but also for various layers ranging from dependent components , which is usually provided by several technical components.Thresholds can be defined for all of these metrics and you can customize event and alerting options based on these thresholds.

SAP BW, the professional data warehouse tool, uses this availability data for standard reporting and highly flexible functionalities for aggregating, correlating, and calculating any data.

Service Availability Management

Service Availability Management (SAM) reports SLA-relevant downtimes of managed objects i.e. technical systems based on data which is adjusted by system administrators to match the end user experience. The data is confirmed by IT service managers or other supervisors. The adjusted downtime data is called service outages. SAP Solution Manager can be the single source of truth for Service Level Agreement (SLA) reporting of system downtimes.

SAM is divided in three parts:

  • Configuration of SAM
  • Maintaining Service Outages
  • Displaying and Reporting of SAM

SAM to collect data needs to setup following steps:-

  • Global Settings for batch jobs, retention of data etc.
  • Configure infrastructure for data import from MAI  and set Threshold Value.
  • Define scope i.e for which  managed objects SAM needs to be activated
  • Setup SAM reporting for dashboard parameters and notification.

Prerequisite

To receive the actual and true value data from Monitoring and Alerting Infrastructure, System Monitoring should be configured and working on a smooth basis with all the availability data in MAI.

Configuration

Data needs to be imported from monitoring and alerting infrastructure (MAI)

Data or workmode needs to be extracted from workmode management (WMM)

Activating services needed to use SAM.

Sending notifications to the contact person responsible, needs the prerequisite of Maintaining  Business Partners.

To enable SAM to collect, compute and display the data for a monitored system, following parameters should be configured:

  • Agreed service times: a weekly timetable which defines the availability of a service, for example, 24/7 or 9/5 availability during the business hours of working days.
  • Threshold values defining the minimum availability in per-cent: for example 99.5% of the time agreed upon in the SLA

From data collected, Service Availability Management computes the following KPIs:

  • The SLA-relevant service availability per managed object is computed
  • SAM Uptime: Time since the last unplanned downtime

Agreed Service Time (AST)

Agreed Service Time should be maintained for defining the service time for a system. Agreed Service Time-patterns are used to standardize the timeframe of an IT system whether it is available for end-users on a weekly basis. Typical availability scenarios are 24 hours/7 days or 9 hours/5 days a week. These patterns can be defined and reused for many managed objects.

Service Availability Management Dashboard

Service Availability Management Dashboard are used to show the reports graphically.

Dashboard shows the availability of the system for the current period of month with the SLA threshold set in configuration.

Dashboard shows the uptime of the managed system since the last downtime in days.

Dashboard shows the availability of the Managed Object for the specific period with the SLA threshold set.

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