August 2021 NEW: Extended account hierarchy and additional views on the account structure
In August, SAP has released new features for the SAP BTP cockpit –multi level account hierarchy
- Extended hierarchy with additional directory levels
- Additional views on directories and subaccounts
These new features are optional, that means that if you don’t require an account hierarchy, you can keep working with your current modeling just like before.
The current hierarchy supports one directory layer between a global account and subaccounts. With the new feature, it will be possible to nest directories with up to five directory layers. All known directory features, like entitlement setting, user administration, and custom properties are available. Also, the subaccounts remain unchanged and will be the sole entity for the activation of runtimes and services. The API (link) and the SAP BTP Command Line Interface (btp CLI) (link) have been extended accordingly to accommodate these new directory layers.
Since you may use more directories to match the organization, SAP has been also offered a consolidated view within the Account Explorer - Directories & Subaccounts to the entire account. This new view comes as an addition to the known Subaccounts View. The new view has two flavors, both displaying the account hierarchy.
Cloud Cockpit - Hierarchy view
The table view which shows the account entities within a tree table and the tree view which shows the account entities as a graph diagram and is very similar to the view already available now, supporting additional hierarchy levels.
What is new with cloud management tools feature set B?
You may have already read (see Cloud Management Tools – Feature Set Overview) that cloud management tools feature set B brings many new and long-awaited functionalities to SAP BTP, which fulfils the needs for managing large account structures and for the automation of cloud management tasks. To name a few of these enhancements:
- Directories are an additional entity to support more granular account structures and provide efficient management of your users and entitlements.
- Custom properties that allow you to assign of additional data, such as 'Cost Center ID' or 'Owner' to directories and subaccounts.
- APIs and a command line interface (sapcp CLI) that gives you programmatic access to SAP BTP. APIs and CLI are the basis for any automation of administrative tasks and integrations with controlling systems.
We're excited to announce that we've now started upgrading enterprise accounts from the existing cloud management tools feature set A to the renovated cloud management tools feature set B.
What does the upgrade mean?
Upgrading means that the SAP BTP cockpit and your account structure will be updated to the enhanced feature set B version.
During the upgrade, services that are activated on SAP BTP are not impacted by the upgrade and they will work without any disruption. However, while the upgrade is running, you won't be able to manage your account structure, or activate and deactivate services. Optimally, the upgrade of each account should be completed within a couple of hours or at the most within one day.
For safeguarding the upgrade, our SAP cloud operators conduct a preflight check to ensure that everything is primed for the upgrade. All existing feature set A capabilities are supported in feature set B with the exception of a custom IdP for platform users (see Bringing your corporate identity to platform users). If this feature is in use in your feature set A account, we'll have to postpone the upgrade to a later time once it's supported. It is planned to release this feature on feature set B later this year. Custom IdPs for application user is already supported in feature set B so this shouldn't be a problem for upgrading your account.
For preparing and conducting the version upgrade, no effort is required on your side. SAP monitors each version upgrade closely.
How to apply for the upgrade?
We have already started with the first set of customer accounts. Since SAP's first priority is to ensure that the version upgrade works well, only a limited number of customers will be upgraded at the same time. Hence, it should be assumed that the upgrade phase will take several months.
All accounts will be upgraded to the new feature set B version, majority will be an upgrade without prior notice since there is no impact on service runtime availability. Nevertheless, please note if you like to get for your account upgraded, you have the option to issue a support incident so that your request be addressed sooner. In this case, please open a BCP support incident on the component BC-NEO-CIS-OPS and all further communication will then be done via this channel. For these upgrade requests, the standard SLA metrics do not apply.
For additional information about the upgrade process and about which details you need to include in the request, please read this SAP Note (3027721).
- SAP Managed Tags:
3 Comments
