Service Availability Management in SAP Solution Manager 7.2

Introduction:

Service Availability Management provides availability reporting for business-critical systems, databases or services. It calculates the availability based on outages detected by system monitoring and compares it to defined availability Service Availability Levels.

Unplanned outages are automatically imported from system monitoring . Planned downtimes are automatically imported from work mode management. They must be reviewed and adjusted by system administrators and confirmed by IT service managers or other supervisors before they are taken into account in the availability reporting. The adjusted downtime data is called service outages.

Why Service Availability Management?

Service Availability Management can be the single source of truth for Availability Service Level Agreement reporting.

Overview of Service Availability Dashboard:

It basically involves below three person(based on responsibility):

1. Service Manager – Maintains the SLA parameters of the system based on agreed maintenance time and period and later on confirms or rejects outrages reviewed by Operations team)
2. Operations team – Can be called as Basis or Admin Team- It corrects outrages created by system, reviews it and marks the reason for the outrage)
3. Customer – Gets the data or the report of the service availability from Service Manager.

The process flow can be understood by the below diagram:

Service Availability Management consists of the following pages:

• The Overview page shows the calculated availability for the selected entities.
• The Outages page shows the outages for the selected entities and allows to create or maintain outages.
• The Service Availability Definitions page shows the Service Availability Definitions for the selected entities and allows to maintain additional service definitions.
• The Analytics page  provides up time reporting.

Note: There has to be only one service definition for a particular system, database or service to be managed by Service Availability Management. For a system, there cannot be two service definition.

How to open Service Availability Management

1. Open the Launchpad
2. Select Technical Administration
3. Select Service Availability

Overview of Service Availability Management:

The Service Reporting page shows the calculated availability for the selected systems, databases and services in selected  reporting periods. It gives you a quick overview whether the availability service level agreement was met or breached.

What is Service Availability Definition?

Each system, database or service that has to be managed by Service Availability Management needs to have an active service definition.

Select the Service Availability Definition page to see the service definitions for the selected systems.

The Service Availability Definitions Overview shows the following data for each service definition.

Different Statuses in Service Availability Definition:

• Completed – Service definitions whose end dates has already passed ( today > end date)
• Active – Service definitions that are active (start date < today < end date). For active service definitions, you can only change the end date
• Inactive – Service definitions that start in the future (today < start date). Only inactive Service definitions can be deleted.

Edit Existing Service Availability Definition

Select a service availability definition to see it’s details. For existing service availability definitions, it is possible to change the end date and to add new Contractual Maintenance Periods. The other settings cannot be changed.

Required Roles for Service Availability Management:

• Technical Administration composite roles: SAP_TECHNICAL_ADMIN_COMP, SAP_TECHNICAL_ADMIN_DISP_COMP
• Service Availability Management roles :
  • SAP_SM_SAM_ALL SAM (Service Availability Management) – full authorization
  • SAP_SM_SAM_DIS SAM (Service Availability Management) – display authorization
  • SAP_SM_SAM_EDIT SAM (Service Availability Management) – execution authorization
  • SAP_SM_SAM_REVIEW SAM (Service Availability Management) – review authorization

Use Case Examples for Service Availability Management:

• The following examples illustrate how service outages can be managed with SAM:
  With SAM, confirmed service outages are created by a combination of automatic and
  manual activities.
• SAM creates service outages automatically, based on the unplanned downtimes, as
  reported by the SAP Solution Manager MAI.
• To adjust the measured data automatically, SAM takes into account the planned
  downtimes defined in service availability definitions or in the SAP Solution Manager WMM.
• SAM regards planned downtimes as not SLA-relevant. Planned downtimes are planned in
  advance, and agreed between the customer and the service provider.
• To decide whether a service outage is SLA relevant, SAM matches the service outages with
  the agreed service times, the promised availability during service times as agreed in an
  SLA contract, according to, for example, a 24/7 or 10/5 schema.
• To enable the application to compute the actual SLA-relevant availability of entities, SAM
  allows you to adjust the data manually. Depending on the use case, you have different
  options.
• To report adjusted or manually created service outages, SAM requires them to be
  confirmed, for example, at the end of an SLA reporting period.

Conclusion:

Service Availability management can be used as a tool for especially for the reporting of the availability of systems(especially Prod Systems). It can be used to its full potential once work mode management is also configured as work mode management and IT Calendar is closely integrated with Service availability management. Work mode management can be used to suppress the outrages and manage the planned maintenance activities in system and not miss the SLA defined.

SAM can give you reports based on monthly or yearly, which can be used to present to customers or stakeholders at higher level.

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