SAP Cloud ALM Q1 2021 Update – What’s new?

Since launch of SAP Cloud ALM last year, it has garnered lot of interest. We realised to keep our customers & partners informed, we need to start a quarterly blog series where we cover what’s new. Last week, we finished our quarterly update global webinars done by Chief Product Owners of Implementation and Operations area. This blog will cover the new features and additional content (SAP products) which SAP Cloud ALM supported roughly from Jan’ 21 to Mar’21. Also note, although the blogs will come at the end of every quarter, new features and content may get released biweekly. It might happen that you already know about the functionalities even before this blog is published. And, this is a good thing.

Let me attempt to capture the highlights for you.

Before I dive into updates, I wish that you and your family are safe as many countries are facing wave 2 or wave 3 of Covid-19 pandemic. Take care!

The blog will be structured in the following way:

1. A quick recap of SAP Cloud ALM
2. SAP Cloud ALM for Implementation Q1 2021 Update
3. SAP Cloud ALM for Operations Q1 2021 Update
4. Additional information

A quick recap of SAP Cloud ALM

SAP Cloud ALM is an application lifecycle management offering for cloud centric customers and hybrid customers. It provides extensive functionality for implementation and operations. You can look at the SAP Cloud ALM in Minute video for a quick recap.

SAP Cloud ALM for Implementation accelerates your journey for cloud solutions by providing a preconfigured, content-driven work environment based on SAP Activate methodology and best practices.  It enables quick onboarding of team members, project planning, task distribution, tracking and gives complete transparency on project progress and health. It further accelerates fit to standard workshops, gathering of requirements, and testing their implementation.

SAP Cloud ALM for Operations ensures business continuity by monitoring SAP Landscape and alerting on anomalies. It further adds to efficiency by automating operational tasks. It also aims to predict anomalies by learning from collected data. It also intends to provide transparency regarding SAP products including business downtimes, business events and business SLAs.

If you are already excited about SAP Cloud ALM, then I must tell you, it is already included in your cloud subscription with SAP Enterprise Support. You can claim your tenant right away.

You can visit here to get all the detail which you may need on SAP Cloud ALM.

SAP Cloud ALM for Implementation Q1 2021 Update

The Q1 update for the implementation is very well summarized in the below picture:

Figure 1: New and improved capabilities of SAP Cloud ALM for Implementation

Let me explain them quickly.

1. Agile Implementation
   1. Timebox concept introduced, new timeboxes are Sprint and Milestone
   2. With the agile concept, the following task types are also introduced:
      • Template Tasks: Provided by SAP, non-editable
      • Project Task: Tasks created by Project Team
      • User Story: Details out requirements
      • Sub task: subtasks linked to user stories. This further helps in breaking it down in small work units.

Figure 2: Phases, Sprints & Milestones (Agile methodology in SAP Cloud ALM)

2. Integration with test automation tools: Now it is possible to integrate the Test Automation Tool (TAT) of SAP S/4HANA Cloud to run the automated tests.

Figure 3: SAP Cloud ALM integrates with SAP S/4HANA Test Automation Tool (TAT)

Some of the improvements of existing functionalities are highlighted below:

1. Project Tracking & Overview: Many new and updated tiles. Additionally, it’s possible to personalize the screen i.e. hide, unhide tiles and save them into different variants.

Figure 4: Enable and disable the cards in overview screen

2. Consumption of SAP Activate based roadmaps: More SAP Activate templates are available for the creation of Project. New templates are e.g. “SAP S/4HAN Cloud Suite Foundation”, “SAP S/4HANA Cloud, extended edition”, “SAP S/4HANA Cloud private edition (new implementation)” and “SAP S/4HANA Cloud , private edition (system conversion)”.

Figure 5: Task Template from SAP Activate based roadmaps

3. Change Management: Possibility to quickly “Approve & Generate User Story” and “Approve & Generate Project Task”.

Figure 6: Easy way to create Task from Requirement

Soon, Simple Process Capability will be introduced in SAP Cloud ALM for Implementation. As you know, we do biweekly functional releases.

You can also hear from Chief Product Owner Michael Kloeffer, what’s new and view his detailed presentation.

SAP Cloud ALM for Operation Q1 2021 Update

SAP Cloud ALM for Operations already supports many cloud services (i.e. SAP cloud products) today and the figure summarizes, the current status & roadmap.

Figure 7: SAP products supported already today and planned until end of 2021

The new functionalities, which are introduced roughly from Jan’21 to Mar’21, are the following:

1. Health Monitoring: New functionality Health Monitoring has been introduced in the first quarter of 2021. It displays the most important health metrics defined by the monitored cloud services & systems.
   1. Health Monitoring visualizes the healthiness of cloud services and systems to identify service disruptions or degradations
   2. Health Monitoring allows to execute application health checks for SAP cloud services to check status of persistency, jobs, connectivity.

Currently, self-monitoring (i.e. SAP Cloud ALM) is supported.

2. Business Process Monitoring
   1. It now additionally supports SAP S/4HANA, private cloud edition. There are 60+ KPIs in Lead to Cash, Source to Pay and Design to Operate. See the detailed list of KPIs here.
   2. Several additional KPIs for SAP Success Factors have been added., namely Job Offers Created, Job Offers Pending, Job Letters Created, Job Letters Pending, etc. See the detail list of available KPIs here.
3. Integration and Exception Monitoring
   1. New Feature: Monitor integrations and exceptions for selected scope & timeframe. It’s also possible to set the retention period of messages up to 14 days. Filters to display messages are further improved. Now you can filter them based on their group e.g. Successful, Info, etc. It’s possible to check the status of housekeeping jobs and alerting jobs of SAP Cloud ALM. Furthermore, you can check invalid messages during the data collection.
   2. New content: Additionally, Field Service Management is supported.

Figure 8: Monitor integrations and exceptions for selected scope

4. Real User monitoring
   1. New Feature: New analysis page for Real User monitoring is introduced. In this flexible page, you can display the values for different request metrics, broken down into different dimensions.

      

      Figure 9: New Analysis page for User monitoring

   2. New Content: It now supports all ABAP On-premise systems and SAP Marketing Cloud.
5. Job and Automation monitoring
   1. New Feature: Views of this capability now also shows Job Types. This is introduced to prepare for ABAP Jobs and BW Process Chains executed in the same ABAP System. It is also possible to get alerts of 2 additional types “Critical Runtime” and “Critical Delays” from cloud services.Figure 10: Get alert on 2 additional types in Job and Automation monitoring
   2. Additional content: Now also centrally monitor SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation (iRPA) jobs. See list of all supported products by Job and Automation monitoring.
6. Business Service Management: Now it automatically imports events from Cloud Availability Center for maintenance, disruption and degradation, planned by SAP.
7. Landscape Management: This is one of the foundation capabilities of SAP Cloud ALM. It has been improved to provide the possibility of adding logical systems i.e. different clients in ABAP systems. It also now supports automatic import of supported SAP Cloud products and its related information is enhanced.

Figure 11: Add logical systems (enabled by possibility of providing client ID for ABAP based systems)

You can also listen to Janko Budzisch, Chief Product Owner for SAP Cloud ALM for Operations, and view the update deck.

Additional Information

1. SAP Cloud ALM on SAP Support Portal: This page has all the information which you may need e.g. overview of SAP Cloud ALM, link to recorded demos (media center), access to online Demo systems, how to claim SAP Cloud ALM, and much more. The list is endless.

2. Expert portal of SAP Cloud ALM for Operations: This is an amazing bundle of information regarding SAP Cloud ALM for Operations. You can easily find out SAP Products supported in Operations area for each capability, overview of capabilities and many additional details.

3. sap.com page of SAP Cloud ALM: Here, you find information on detailed feature description, what’s new, and setup & administration guide. Very important: These pages are maintained biweekly and hence it’s always latest.

4. Implementation and Operations learning journeys: We have two fantastic learning journeys in the Implementation & Operations space. It’s updated on quarterly basis and provides you a learning curriculum from overview to deep dive level.

5. Task Management blog: Global Product Owner Jagmohan has started a nice and detailed blog series. Would be great to go through them to understand the nuances of Task Management.