SAP IT Infrastructure Management – Use case examples

The SAP Solution Manager extension “SAP IT Infrastructure Management” enables customers worldwide to manage and monitor their whole IT – from application layer down to separate infrastructure components. The software combines both application management and IT infrastructure monitoring and helps IT departments to reduce downtimes and to ensure service quality for their users.

Use case change management – Implement device changes in time and without any risk to your business!

The reasons for performance problems or system downtimes often base on IT components that are out of order. The consequence: A network administrator needs to replace the network device or change the configuration. To do so, at first he has to find a good maintenance window to ensure business continuity. Afterwards he has to document every step he is doing during the change process.

SAP IT Infrastructure Management in combination with SAP Solution Manager provides customers with this support. Change request management in SAP Solution Manager can be used to document the complete change process and to ensure that the change:

• has been approved by the relevant colleagues,
• has been tested before the final implementation,
• can be reported.

The integration of SAP IT Infrastructure Management provides all necessary information about the network device and answers the following questions:

• Which SAP systems are affected by this change?
• Which other network devices are affected?
• When is the best maintenance window?

This seamless integration supports you in implementing changes on time and without any risk to your business.

Use case device provisioning – Close all unused ports to ensure network security!

To enhance the network security unknown devices should not be able to connect to the network. In addition, all ports that are not currently used should be closed.

With SAP IT Infrastructure Management all assets, their configuration status and performance data are discovered automatically and are stored in a central Configuration Management Data Base (CMDB). Within that database network administrators can search for all switches in a specific area automatically. All found switches or other devices can be bundled in a group, and the network administrator can create scripts to execute on that group. A script like this can close all unused ports. Before these changes are made it is important to save the configuration. This can be also done automatically. If there is an incident after the distribution of a new configuration, configurations can be compared, and stored configurations can be restored.

Use case big landscapes – Gain full transparency and manage your whole landscape centrally!

This use case describes the setup of SAP IT Infrastructure in the following scenario:

• You need a centralized overview of the servers and devices of your multi-national enterprise.
• Your US headquarter has about 5,000 devices
• Your largest Indian subsidiary has about 4,000 devices and some servers with important applications. Your network bandwidth to India is already overloaded with a lot of application traffic to the US.
• You have one smaller subsidiary in Germany with 580 devices. There are no servers running in Germany. Your network connection to Germany is good, but there is a heavy application traffic load that is using a lot of the bandwidth.
• You have a small subsidiary in South Africa with 78 Devices. Your network connection is very good.

This means that your application and IT landscape are getting more and more complex and you risk to loose overview.

With SAP IT Infrastructure Management all your applications and IT components are visible and transparent. Clear structured maps like below make sure that you always keep track of your landscape – no matter how complex are.

Use case baselining – Ensure consistent baseline configuration!

How can administrators check if certain servers have the same baseline configuration?

For example, the configuration should be:

• at least 4 GB of RAM
• at least 3 GHz CPU
• Microsoft Windows 7 Professional

With SAP IT Infrastructure Management the administrator groups the related servers and runs the SAP IT Infrastructure Management baseline report.

The baseline report shows how many nodes are not complying with the baseline.

In a detailed list, all servers in the group are listed with the details that are not complying with the baseline:

More use cases?

Definitely! There’s lot of things more to do with SAP IT Infrastructure Management and SAP Solution Manager. Feel free to post your own use cases here and to discuss them with us!