How to Reduce Manual Effort in CIM model and CR Content Update of SLD Systems

Last update: 14th of August, 2019

Introduction

The SAP NetWeaver System Landscape Directory (SLD) is the main source of technical systems’ information in your landscape gathering data of installed systems via their data suppliers. To be able to handle this data the SLD CIM Model and CR Content need to be up-to-date (see SAP Note 669669). In most cases, this manual action is done on each SLD individually, many of which may exist in a landscape. Using the (Full Automatic) Content Synchronization mechanism and the SLD Namespace concept wisely, you can update one SLD manually and automate the CIM Model/CR Content update for all other SLD systems.

Automated Update Options for CIM/CR Content

There are two update options for CIM/CR Content available:

• CIM/CR Content Update Options as of SAP Solution Manager 7.2 SPS09
• Using Full Automatic Sync to distribute CIM and CR Content from a dedicated namespace

Both options are described in the following.

Note:

• If your are newly using the option of SAP Solution Manager 7.2 SPS09, you can enter all target systems directly.
• If you’re using Full Automatic Sync to distribute CIM and CR Content from a dedicated namespace, both options can be combined as follows: The SLD acting as CIM/CR Content source can be updated automatically; existing full automatic sync connections will distribute the content.
  Make sure, that no SLD namespace is updated with both options.

CIM/CR Content Update Options as of SAP Solution Manager 7.2 SPS09

As of SAP Solution Manager 7.2 SPS09, both SLD and LMDB can be targeted directly with CIM model data and CR content import. This is available as manual or automatic import in both repositories.

The new features allow greater flexibility in SLD/LMDB topology; if no SLD client applications are used, no SLD is needed. Independent of the target for CIM/CR data, this recurring task can be automated.
Even for the automated CIM/CR Update of the SLD, this is configured in SAP Solution Manager transaction SolMan_Setup:

Figure 1: Configuration of import options for CIM/CR content for SLD/LMDB in SAP Solution Manager 7.2 SPS09.

Using Full Automatic Sync to Distribute CIM and CR Content from a Dedicated Namespace

Note that this procedure should be tested by you in a sandbox and used very carefully – not fulfilling the prerequisites or performing the steps wrong, will cause data inconsistencies.

Full Automatic Synchronization (FAS) of SLD content keeps all data of connected SLD systems in sync; this includes CIM Model and CR Content data. However, FAS does not allow for filtering of data, nor does it give any control about the point in time when content is synchronized: All changes become active on the target of an FAS connection more or less at once. Therefore, you must not simply connect the DEV SLD to QA SLD to PRD SLD because all manually created data need to be synchronized in a controlled manner between SLDs with different roles – see How-to Handle Data in the SAP NetWeaver System Landscape Directory. On the other hand, there is data, which should be available on each SLD:

• Technical Systems’ data should be available in the whole landscape – but this is easily handled by Bridge Forwarding of Data Supplier data.
• Also, any SLD version can cope with any CIM Model and CR Content version.

The fastest mechanism that can be used to transport CIM/CR Content is the full automatic synchronization. However, FAS always transports all changes – to use FAS for the update of CIM/CR Content only, a specific configuration is needed:

To separate CIM/CR Content from all the other content (manually created content and technical systems’ data) you can utilize the SLD namespace concept – see figure 1:

Figure 2: SLD systems, namespaces and connections in a typical landscape to optimize SLD content maintenance by automation of CIM Model and CR Content update.

Note that there MUST not be FAS connections transporting back CIM/CR Content to SLD (PRD).

Prerequisites

• All SLD systems, in which CIM Model and CR Content are to be updated automatically, need to be running on SAP NetWeaver 7.1 or higher to be able to retrieve data from another SLD by Full Automatic Synchronization.
• This process needs not be installed at the beginning – it can be installed at any time, if the prerequisites explained below are adhered to when a new synchronization connection for CIM model and CR Content is added.
• The unique-path-principle must be fulfilled (the same content must not reach any SLD on two different paths – for valid topologies see How-to Handle Data in the SAP NetWeaver System Landscape Directory or the Planning Guide – System Landscape Directory mentioned there.)
• Most importantly, when adding such a new FAS connection for a target namespace that already contains CR Content, ensure the following:  Both the CIM model and the CR content version of the target namespace sld/active and the source namespace sld/cim_cr MUST be the same. Otherwise the CR Content in the target namespace will become inconsistent.

Steps

Automatically updating CIM Model and CR Content should not affect your SLD performance noticeably. In case that your SLD is working without some performance buffer near its maximum capacity, you should either strengthen the SLD system or plan the CIM Model/CR Content update for times when the load is small by planning the manual CIM/CR Content update in the central SLD accordingly. (if this cannot be achieved with FAS, keeping the manual process for such an SLD might be recommendable.)

Note: Once you are using this automated setup for CIM/CR-updates you MUST NOT perform manual CIM/CR-updates in the target SLDs anymore. This would lead to inconsistent data.

1. Create a namespace for CIM Model and CR-Content on one SLD (probably your central SLD), where you keep CIM Model and CR Content up-to-date, naming it sld/cim_cr for example
2. Create a FAS connection on every SLD which can be updated with latest CIM Model and CR Content (see “Prerequisites”) to namespace sld/cim_cr on the central SLDNote that on these target systems, no additional namespace is required: sld/active can be directly the target namespace for the update to take effect on technical systems data. When adding such a new FAS connection for a target namespace that already contains CR Content, both the CIM model and the CR Content version of the target namespace sld/active and the source namespace sld/cim_cr MUST be the same.
3. For the source SLD containing namespace sld/cim_cr, there are two options to update CIM/CR-Content:a. You can automate the required update of namespace sld/active by creating a local uni-directional FAS to its own sld/cim_cr namespace.b. If you want to be in control of the CIM/CR-state of this SLD (which probably is your productive one) you can import it manually.

   Note: You can control the point of time to update CIM/CR-Content: Optionally, you can de-activate the FAS connection updating the CIM/CR-Content and activate it manually, if you want to perform an update.
   Make sure in this case that for each single update to the central CIM/CR namespace the connection is activated.

Result

CIM Model and CR Content will be updated automatically in any SLD reading the CIM-CR namespace.

Summary

Setting up your SLD landscape as shown will reduce the manual effort of keeping the CIM Model and CR Content in your SLD systems up-to-date. In the best case it can be reduced to one system where this data has to be maintained manually.

Additional Information

More information on the SLD is available at the SDN:

• SLD Overview: http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/nw-sld
• SLD – Blogs and Demos: SLD Resources page
• SLD Full Automatic Synchronization Feature – blog & demo