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The present blog is the result of the effort of our Solution Manager Technical Team, that working in different areas made this simple solution available to our user community.  There is no big secret behind this, but there are so many presentations SAP has in which they say it is possible to forward ITSM incidents to SAP, but after some weeks we could not find the easy way to do it and all the elements that are required to have all the pieces working like a Swiss watch.

Following our sense of sharing our experience as it flourishes, below you will find it all grained ready and ready for baking.

Steps.

1.  There is an Assignment Block hidden in the ITSMWebUi, called SAP Collaboration.  You have to make it visible selecting Lazy or Direct.

3. You need to enable the transaction type actions that are relevant for this service.  Some are already activated, some others not.  Via transaction CRMC_ACTION_DEF select the transaction type (ZMIN  or ZMRQ) and activate the services below:

The actions above cover a wide range of activities related to the incidents opened with SAP.    For this particular blog, we are not going to deal with actions like Opening system for SAP or Maintain SAP Logon Data.  Although they are related to the topic per se, the goal here is to show how we can enable functionality.  Those mentioned actions are more Basis related and authorization and security may be involved to actually control who can perform them, as well.

4.  Behind the scenes, the processing of all requests uses the RFC (Remote Function Call - for the non-Basis folks), SAP-OSS.  That connection should be always enabled with a SAP marketplace user and its correct password there.

The connection test must be successful.  If it fails, coordinate with your Basis support.   On the paper, the SAP support user being used in the RFC should be an anonymous account with its correspondent associated user in the ABAP stack of your SolMan system.   That latter is recommended to be an account type System or Service, which password does not expire.   The reason for the match between those 2 accounts will be explained further down.

5.  All the users who regularly create incidents directly in the SAP marketplace, including the anonymous account should have an entry in the SAP Reference IMG > SAP Solution Manager > Technical Settings > Assign S-User for SAP Support Portal Functionality.

6.  With that in place you are all set.  The following screens will tell you how to create the incident and get the replies from SAP.

6.1 Create an incident as usual.   Important is that you add a description, which may not be mandatory for internal incidents, though no logic.

Remark:  You can also add attachments in the respective assignment block?

6.2.  If the incident is to be sent to SAP support portal, you will find in ITSM a new assignment block in the incident called SAP Collaboration.   Click there and the button Sent to SAP.

6.2  From then on, a process similar to the one you also followed when you had to open incidents in the SAP support portal.  You will need to proceed one by one through the screens, being aware that in many cases you do not have to worry about some empty fields.  The solution internally complete most of them as you move along.

6.3 For the screen below, what is most important is the system data and that is automatically entered due to the fact that in the moment the incident was created, a component was to be selected.       Provide any additional information that may help SAP to properly identify your system.  We only provided the basic part and that is sufficient.

6.4 For the next step, the system internally checks that the user creating the incident, has a S0* account in SAP service marketplace or in  SolMan's view V_AISUSER (or SPRO > SAP reference IMG > SAP Solution Manager Implementation Guide > SAP Solution Manager > Technical Settings > Assign S-user for SAP support functionality).   If you regularly create incidents in SAP support portal, we have taken care of your account, long time ago.    This was explained already in step 5.

Green means okay, whereas Red, means either the sapgui account used in ITSM has not been associated in the table referred above with a S-user account, or the sapgui account being used in ITSM does not have a S-user account at all requested in SAP support portal.   If there is an error on the screen bellow, consult your SAP Basis provider.

6.5  For the following screen, you are prompted to provide the specific SAP component at SAP that this incident should be associated with.  In other words, the team at SAP that you think should take care of this incident. Also, proceed to provide a priority to the incident, which may be different than the priority given to the incident in the header when it was originally created.

6.6  Provide any additional information that you think is important for SAP support to now.  This is not mandatory and you can skip it by pressing Next.

6.7  If you are satisfied, submit the incident to SAP, otherwise press the Previous button and review again.

Any errors when you submit, contact your Basis Team.  Most likely an issue related to RFC SAP-OSS.

6.8  In case the RFC connection is correct or was corrected, the result after submitting the incident should look like below.

As you can see, incident at SAP is 48869.

6.9  Additionally change the status of the ITSM incident to Sent to SAP, so that the requester is aware of the status of their incident.

6.10  The behavior in the background is exactly as if you had created the incident directly in the SAP support portal.  You do not need to do the step below, but it is just FYI.   You can open the incident at the SAP support portal and see that even the attachments of the original ITSM incident are also found there, as expected.

6.11  From then on, you are already familiar with the processing.

SAP eventually will place the message in Customer Action.  Further down we explain an automatic process to feed ITSM from SAP support portal, but you can individually check if there is an update from SAP for your own incident.  In the same Assignment Block SAP Collaboration, press the button Update from SAP.

6.12  If you see that the incident is in Customer Action, the reply from SAP has been included in the Assignment Block Text, and if they submitted attachments they will also be found in the respective Assignment Block, as well.

Reply from SAP with attachments:

6.13  If you are satisfied, you can proceed to Confirm the incident for which you press the button Confirm at SAP, or you can go back and Send to SAP for further actions.   After you confirm, you can even complete the survey from ITSM.  What else do you need!!!

7. Q&A?

7.1 Is there a way to automatically feed ITSM with the replies from SAP, instead of having to individually press the button Update from SAP at each open incident?

Answer:  Yes.   There is a program you can schedule for that to run every 5 minutes.  The program is AI_CRM_IM_UPDATE_FROM_SAP.   If there is a change found a the support portal for any incident in progress, the ITSM SAP Collaboration statusof each ITSM incident affected changes from Sent to SAP to Customer Action, and the ITSM incident's header status changes from Sent to SAP to In Process.  That action should trigger an internal email notification so that the incident processor at your company gets notified that an update from SAP has arrived.

That process or activation of that notification is well documented in: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-35291

Important to say that the email configuration is optional, and it is based on events. The PPF actions that trigger the email are based on a scheduling condition

and a start condition.   The notifications are not triggered directly by AI_CRM_IM_UPDATE_FROM_SAP, but by the subsequent status change affected by the that program.

Recommendation.  Search in the marketplace for the program and apply all missing notes you have with regards to it.  There is a huge improvement SAP has done to that report over time, so you better dance with the latest and avoid unnecessary troubleshooting.

7.2  What about incidents we already created in the SAP support portal?  Can they be imported into ITSM?

Answer:  Yes, they can.  There is an option in the program AI_CRM_IM_UPDATE_FROM_SAP to create new incidents in ITSM for those cases.  There is even an option to create ITSM incidents for already confirmed messages, but that can overload your system and may take time to run.

7.3 What if I go and update the try to close the incident directly in the SAP support portal?

Answer:  Next time you run AI_CRM_IM_UPDATE_FROM_SAP it will bring over on to ITSM those updates.

7.4 What if I confirm the incident right in the SAP market place?

AnswerNice try!!! :lol:   SAP will send you back the incident and you will only be able to request confirmation in ITSM.

7.5  Will SAP still notify me via email that my incident at SAP is in Customer Action?

Answer:  Not anymore.  Note 1278052 explains SAP stopped doing that due to the confusion that created and also to enforce us to use ITSM, instead.  Read 9.1, which has the link to enable internal notifications.

7.6 What if there is an attachment in my incident larger than 4MB, current restriction SAP has in the support portal for the attachments?

Answer:  Oh boy!!! I cannot do the whole exercise.  I am already exhausted of typing :mad:   Could you give it a try and share with us? :wink:

7.7  What about reporting?  Can I see the incidents with the respective SAP message number assigned by SAP?

Answer:  Yes and from factory.  Stay tuned for the answer.   TIP.  It is an additional column you could add to the incident search.

Enjoy!!!

Juan-Carlos Garcia-Garavito

Other posts from this author @ juan-carlos.garcia-3/content

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