Assume that there are lot of servers in your landscape and you want to know the details of them like what components have been installed, maintaining RFC connections.It seems to be Gruesome task.. How would you go about maintaining it?
SAP provides an excellent usage called as
SLD
i.e. System landscape Directory. A system landscape consists of a number of hardware and software components that depend on each other regarding to installation, software updates, and demands on interfaces.
Since the data about your system landscape is updated automatically, SLD always provides you with reliable and up-to-date information. Thus, SLD is a central information provider for SAP and third-party tools that use this data to deliver the services that you need to keep your
Landscape up and running.
I would love to give analogies pertaining to it.
Analogy 1
:[start]Assume in the class there are 10 students and the teacher has to maintain their records and handle them and hence teacher appoints a monitor who is one among the 10 students.
Teacher :: Administrator
Students:: servers
Monitor :: SLD
What makes the teacher appoint a particular student as a monitor depends on the students academic performance and etc.
So an SLD server may be a high availability or 8GB ram server. It's left to the admin to choose one.
we take the same example of teacher , monitor and students. Now the teacher has appointed a monitor of the class to collect the details of all other students. Assume that the class contains students from different parts of the world and they are not able to communicate to the monitor using a single language. How will the monitor communicate with the students?
Hence the teacher will provide certain converting tools to the monitor to help him to comprehend.The converter would convert whatever the students would communicate into a Monitor understandable langauge.That common language is called CIM and the converter is SLD Bridge. Now if you ask the students to give the details of their home town , house address , name of their dependents, all these students would give it in their format. But monitor will have his on format to collect the details in such a way that whatever the students would give him he would format it into an understandable format,so that it would be understood by the teacher who would be asking the details henceforth.
Common language :: CIM model
Converter ::SLD Bridge
So to relate, If in your landscape you have AS-JAVA,AS-ABAP and other third party systems, each of them would be giving their own data , now to consolidate and to convert the data so that the SLD can comprehend , we need to Import the CIM model which is a common language. IT also contains the components available in SAP, and Until the CIM model is not imported you cannot list you systems in the SLD.
Now For more updates on SLD Bridge,SLD gateway and how to register an ABAP system and JAVA system in SLD, Kindly refer to my blog Discovering SLD-PART 2
