Solution Manager 7.1: Maintenance Optimizer intelligence

Introduction

lot of customers have already made the switch to Solution Manager 7.1. One of the well known technical functionalities inside Solution Manager is the Maintenance Optimizer. The Maintenance Optimizer (aka MOPZ) is designed for SAP system maintenance. It is mostly used to select, download and approve the necessary files to perform a support package stack installation, an enhancement package installation or an upgrade.

Outside Discovery

Picture 1.0

Picture 1.1

When you perform the managed system setup in Solution Manager 7.1 agents (diagnostics and host agent) are used to fetch operating system (picture 1.0) and database information (picture 1.1) of the managed SAP system. This means that once the managed system setup is complete, your Solution Manager knows which Operating System and Database are in use by the managed SAP system.

Maintenance Optimizer intelligence

Picture 1.2

Picture 1.3

I wanted to perform maintenance on a managed SAP system of which you can see the Operating System and Database details in picture 1.0 and picture 1.1. To do so I started a new maintenance transaction and after going through a couple of screens, I got to the screen where I have to select OS/DB-Dependent Files (see picture 1.2). You can see on Picture 1.3 that when you expand a specific operating system you are presented with the different available database options from which you have to select and expand the correct one.

I guess I expected that Solution Manager 7.1 would be able to select the correct operating system and database for my managed SAP system. Needless to say I was disappointed after seeing the same result as in Solution Manager 7.0 EHP1.

Here we have a Solution Manager that knows the details of the operating system and the database of managed SAP system and yet it’s not using that information to either select the correct files for the administrator or to narrow down the options!

Why do I say narrow down the list? Because SAP has four different types of SAP kernels (regular and extended and for both the options non-unicode or unicode) available for their recent technology platforms. I’m not a big fan of having too many different kernel types around. It creates confusion if not anything else. If the maintenance optimizer would be more intelligent it could detect which kernel(s) are suitable and only display those. At the same time it could also directly narrow down the list to the database that is being used by the managed SAP system.

Call for votes

That’s what we have Ideaplace for right? For ideas like this. To me this seems like a very feasible idea, as such I have created an idea on SAP Ideaplace and I hope many of you will vote the idea up to get the attention of SAP and have this implemented.

Vote on this idea on ideaplace: https://cw.sdn.sap.com/cw/ideas/9085.

Picture 1.4

The end result could look like the screenshot in picture 1.4 by using the data that is available in Solution Manager. Do we want the maintenance optimizer to be more intelligent? Yes we do!

Vote on this idea on ideaplace: https://cw.sdn.sap.com/cw/ideas/9085.

Related content

Maintenance Optimizer on SAP Service Marketplace

SAP Note 1632036 – Landscape Fetch in SAP Solution Manager 7.x : What does it exactly do ?
SAP Note 1672382 – Produktsysteme in der SMSY im Release 7.1

Solution Manager 7.1 Maintenance Optimizer on help.sap.com

Approve SAP Service Marketplace download files without using the maintenance optimizer

Download approvals gone with the wind – 80 votes up and counting!