Service Availability Management using SAP Solution Manager 7.2 – Part 2

Maintaining Outages

In the last blog we discussed how to create a service definition. Now that the definition is in place, let’s see how to maintain outages of a managed system. System downtime is referred as outages in Service Availability Management.

There are two kinds of outages that you can create. They are:

• Planned outage
  • Can come in from sources like work modes
  • Can be created manually
• Unplanned outage
  • Can come in from sources like monitoring and alerting
  • Can be created manually

Here is how an outage maintenance screen looks like:

It captures the following details :

Availability calculation relevant fields:

• Type – planned/unplanned;
• Category – hardware maintenance/software maintenance etc.
• SLA relevance flag  – determines how this outage will affect the availability calculation.
• Status – shows the current status of the outage like new/in process/to be reviewed/confirmed ;
• duration and time zone

Informational attributes

• Responsible processor,
• Source – MAI/WMM/Manual
• Reason for outage
• Business impact
• Comments

Change Log is provided to keep track of any changes on outage like when/who/what. This is how an outage change log looks like.

Actions possible on an outage.

1. Hide/Un-hide
2. Status change

Both actions will influence the availability calculation.

Sources of outages:

1. Work Modes(WMM): Planned work modes created for a system will reflect as an outage in service availability.
2. Alerts(MAI) :  Availability alerts of technical systems will reflect as an outage in service availability
3. Manual : If some outages are missed due to any chance, IT operators can manually maintain outages to keep track of downtime.

In the next part you can learn about reviewing outages and availability calculations.