Maintenance Certificates and License Management Workcenter in Solution Manager

The maintenance certificate was introduced to enable SAP’s software logistics tools (such as SPAM, SAINT,…) to identify your system and the exact scope of your corresponding SAP maintenance agreement. It also enables the tools to deliver tailor-made services based on your specific requirements and improves the quality of your SAP solution by preventing patches from being accidentally deployed to the wrong system.

Despite of having good documentation sources and good SAP notes about this topic it is at times unclear on what we are dealing with and how to resolve issues in this area.

First and the foremost point of entry for Maintenance Certificates can be the Knowledge Base Article 1533350. It details out the different sources of information on Maintenance Certificates and also has some FAQ’s built in.

While dealing with Maintenance Certificates one should always be clear in mind that a Maintenance Certificate unlike a SAP License is only issued for a period of 3 months. So although the Certificate file and the installation mechanism seems to be similar there is a basic difference in them. Both can be differentiated by the values displayed in the “Sware_PROD” column in transaction SLICENSE,

Maintenance Certificates have the value > Maintenance_<DB> where DB replaces the database that you are using.</p><p>A few important points to understand and the basic questions to be answered are :</p><p>

</p><p>How am I deploying my Maintenance Certificate ? Manually or via Solution Manager ? </p><p>This determines the method via which one would request the maintenance certificate. If it is manual then use the License Portal of SAP to generate one for the respective system. </p><p>If via Solution Manager then ensure that configurations are performed correctly and activated so that Solution Manager can deploy the certificate correctly.</p><p>

</p><p>What kind of data should I carefully check and review for ordering the maintenance certificates manually ?</p><p>One should check the Active Hardware key of the system ( via SLICENCE or via SAPLICENSE command on the OS ) to ensure that the hardware key being used is correct. More often usage of incorrect hardware key results in incorrect certificate.</p><p>Also it is advisable to once check the Service Marketplace and ensure that the right hardware keys are maintained on the System-data. More often there are multiple hardware keys maintained ( Due to system migrations, or test system cases ) and hence the system-data contains multiple hardware keys. Delete the old ones if not needed. It is a cleaner approach while generating the certificate manually.</p><p>

</p><p>What if I am using Solution Manager ?</p><p>For automatic Deployment carefully review the KBA 1533350. Make sure that you are referring to the right Solution Manager release document.  There is also a troubleshooting note linked in the KB article which can be used to troubleshoot the issues that you are facing in the automatic deployment. </p><p>Ensure that the Solution Manager is set as a master for SDCCN tasks in transaction SDCCN for the managed system and also that SMSY contains the up-to-date information about the managed system. The managed system should fulfill the prequisites for automatic deployment as well.</p><p>

</p><p>How do I know that Solution Manager has received the right certificate ? Any method of checking this ?</p><p>You can use the report RAGS_MK_DISPLAY_FILE to check if the Solution Manager contains a license file for the Managed System. Simply execute this report via SE8 / SA38 and fill in the system number that appears in the SLICENSE transaction of the Managed system. It should then display a XML file to you.The field SWPRODUCTNAME=Maintenance_### declares a maintenance certificate in this file.</p><p>

</p><p>Is there a sure way to check whether the Settings that I have done in Solution Manager and the Managed system would work ?</p><p>Yes there is. Delete the existing maintenance certificate from the Managed system (Ensure that you have a copy of the certificate before you delete or you can download one from the marketplace). Then simple execute the “Get License Data” task via transaction SDCCN on the Managed system. If the configurations are correct and the Solution Manager has procured the Certificate the certificate should be deployed correctly on the Managed system.</p><p>

</p><p>Are there any tables that I can know which store the certificates ? OR I can check the timestamps ? Any background job on Solution Manager that retrieves the data in these tables ?</p><p>Yes. The 2 basic tables AGS_MAINT_KEYS and AGS_MK_LIC_EXP. The tables are filled on execution of the background job REFRESH_ADMIN_DATA_FROM_SUPPORT. </p><p>Ensure that the S userid maintained in the AISUSER table has the authorization to view and download license data.<br /> </p><p>

</p><p>OK. So I have deployed the Maintenance Certificate yet the License Management workcenter does not display correct status?</p><p>There are 2 mechanisms via which the License Management workcenter gets the data. </p><p>Columns filled via job LANDSCAPE FETCH (via RFC call), the data is retrieved from managed system (ST-PI 700_2008_1 required):</p><p>- License<br />- Maintenance Certificates</p><p>Columns filled via REFRESH_ADMIN_DATA_FROM_SUPPORT, the data is retrieved from SAP Global Support Backbone and is stored locally in Solution Manager. The data is only filled for systems as of SAP_BASIS 700, in all other cases they are grey</p><p>- Received License<br />- Received Maintenance Certificate</p><p>Since for Java based systems there is no RFC the section is grey.</p><p>—

I have tried my best to answer the most common queries and issues that we face in this topic. I hope that it helps understand Maintenance Certificates in a broader sense.