Using the SAP EarlyWatch Alert Solution Finder Effectively

Introduction to the SAP EarlyWatch Alert Workspace

SAP EarlyWatch Alert is an automatic diagnostic service that monitors the essential administrative areas of an SAP system. The corresponding data is collected from the managed systems and is used for creating a system-specific report, which contains alerts indicating critical situations and gives recommendations to improve performance and stability. Depending on your settings, you can display the report as an HTML document or as a Microsoft Word document – the well-known SAP EarlyWatch Alert reports that you activate and read from your SAP Solution Manager.

But this system-centric approach consuming the reports is not state-of-the-art any more. Administrators simply don’t have the time going through a report for every managed system. So SAP offers a new approach taking advantage of the fact that the SAP EarlyWatch Alert data is processed at SAP: we are offering a cloud service giving you the opportunity to see all the relevant information for all your systems at a glance.

This is the SAP EarlyWatch Alert Workspace in SAP for Me.

Although the SAP EarlyWatch Alert reports are the basis of the information displayed in the workspace, the app is much more than a report reader in the cloud. It is the central landing page regarding stability, configuration, hardware utilization and performance for your whole system landscape. And your familiar reports are still available in the app – just choose the Overall Rating card, and download the report for any system from the list by choosing Export Service Report (the WORD document icon in column Download).

From the workspace, you can start different apps covering different aspects of SAP EarlyWatch Alert information, enriched and completed with machine learning. For example, you can display the history and the forecast of entries in SAP HANA tables or the development over time of the most important KPIs on system, database and application server level.

The In-app Help of the SAP EarlyWatch Alert Workspace

All these apps are intuitive and easy to use with a fresh and modern UI, containing an excellent documentation concept. The in-app help displays help content as an overlay on top of the application. In case you’ve never used it before, I’ll give you a short introduction. To enable the in-app help, simply click on the question mark in the upper right hand corner of the screen:

At first, the context help will appear – it consists of an informational bar across the bottom of the screen (the carousel) and green circles around these elements that have in-app help:

So the information available where you need it (in the app itself) and visible only when you need it (after activated).

Introducing the SAP EarlyWatch Solution Finder

But now to the other topic of the blog – the SAP EarlyWatch Solution Finder. You start it from the workspace by clicking the Alerts card; for alerts and information how to react to these situations this app is the heart of the SAP EarlyWatch Alert cloud apps.

Use the SAP EarlyWatch Alert Solution Finder for a full text search over all your SAP EarlyWatch Alert reports for any search term or affected system. For every place of finding the affected systems are displayed; choose the system to see the complete corresponding paragraph of the SAP EarlyWatch Alert report.

The search results are divided into Alerts, Recommendations and Descriptions for the systems in your landscape. Descriptions are sections of the reports containing additional information not marked as alerts and recommendations. All three result types are important, and depending on the search term, you may find the relevant reference under another tab.

In this context you are invited to have a look at the guided tour Search in Reports. Guided tours (another part of the in-app help) provide step-by-step contextual guidance to help you complete your process tasks. This guided tour in the SAP EarlyWatch Alert Solution Finder is the first one available in the workspace – others will follow. In it, you will search the reports for a keyword, and you will make sure that the app finds all references to the term – regardless of the context or the system in which that term occurs.

To start the guided tour in the SAP EarlyWatch Solution Finder activate the in-app help, choose Guided Tour and Search in Reports in the carousel.

Example for a Search in the SAP EarlyWatch Solution Finder

As mentioned above, in the SAP EarlyWatch Alert apps, you do not go through several system reports. Instead, the apps give you an global overview about the most important issues in your system landscape. Let’s give an example for that approach.

You are using SAP for Me, and in the app My SAP Notes & KBAs, you are informed about SAP Note 2664814 (Indexserver Crashes During Startup After Ungraceful Shutdown), relevant for SAP HANA. You want to check which systems might be affected and search for “2664814” in the SAP Early Watch Solution Finder. You will find the relevant results in tab Descriptions:

Select one of the systems listed in Important SAP Notes for SAP HANA to display the relevant part of the well-known system-based report.

The SAP EarlyWatch Solution Finder is your personal assistant for the SAP EarlyWatch reports of all your managed systems – if it is anywhere in these reports, he will find it and guide you to the right report of the right system.