ALM - Questions & Answers

This page provides a collection of frequently asked questions and related answers collected at various customer events regarding Application Lifecycle Management (ALM).

For an extensive collection of questions and answers regarding ALM and the corresponding products, please refer to the ALM Questions & Answers list.

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Cross-Topics

Application lifecycle management (ALM) comprises the processes, tools, and services required to manage SAP and third-party solutions. As part of your maintenance contract, SAP provides autonomous ALM solutions that help our customers ensure business continuity, reduce operation and implementation costs, and accelerate time to market.

SAP offers three strategic ALM solutions. They target at different target groups:

  • SAP Cloud ALM provides standardized ALM processes with the focus on requirements of cloud-centric customers. 
  • SAP Focused Run is designed for businesses that need high-volume system and application monitoring, alerting, and analytics. It addresses service providers and customers with advanced needs.
  • SAP Solution Manager supports customer-individual ALM processes for on-premise and hybrid solutions.

There is no functional parity between SAP Cloud ALM, SAP Solution Manager, or SAP Focused Run.

RISE with SAP contracts include SAP Enterprise Support, Cloud Editions. And this includes an entitlement for SAP Cloud ALM. RISE with SAP customers can request and use their own SAP Cloud ALM tenant without additional license or subscription fee.

However, the agreement does not include usage rights for SAP Solution Manager. If customers want to use SAP Solution Manager for RISE with SAP, they have to either have an on-premise SAP maintenance contract (which includes usage rights for SAP Solution Manager). Or they have to subscribe to a special SAP S/4HANA Cloud package “SAP Solution Manager, private cloud edition”.

SAP Focused Run supports RISE with  SAP as well. However, it is not included in any SAP maintenance agreement. It has to be licensed separately.

SAP Solution Manager usage rights are included in on-premise maintenance agreements only. SAP S/4HANA Cloud comes with a cloud maintenance agreement (SAP Enterprise Support, Cloud Editions). Hence, you will have no usage rights for SAP Solution Manager anymore unless you have another valid on-premise maintenance agreement or you subscribe for a special SAP Solution Manager offering from SAP Enterprise Cloud Services.

Both SAP Solution Manager and SAP Cloud ALM are covered by SAP maintenance. Customers with a valid on-premise maintenance contract can use SAP Solution Manager without paying an additional license for it. SAP Cloud ALM is provided for all customers with SAP Enterprise Support, Cloud Editions (included in SAP cloud subscriptions), SAP Enterprise Support, or Product Support for Large Enterprises.

Only SAP Focused Run needs to be licensed separately.

SAP Cloud ALM

Based on SAP Business Technology Platform, the solution supports the application lifecycle management (ALM) of our intelligent solution suite and offers standardized ALM functions focused on operational efficiency. Take control of the configuration, deployment, and management of your business processes with the SAP Cloud ALM solution.

Customers can request their own SAP Cloud ALM tenant for free if they have a valid SAP Enterprise Support maintenance contract, or SAP Enterprise Support, Cloud Editions included in their cloud subscription.

Please browse the list of features in SAP Help Portal.

Please see the list of supported solutions.

Just click the Request button on the SAP Cloud ALM home page and follow the instructions.

Entitled customers can get only one SAP Cloud ALM tenant currently per customer number. But SAP has announced that it plans enabling customers to request extra SAP Cloud ALM tenants for the same customer number. This will be a commercial offering on the SAP price list. The price is still under discussion and cannot be disclosed at this stage. SAP plans to have this commercial offering available in H2/2024. More details will be provided when available.

SAP Solution Manager

SAP Solution Manager 7.2 follows the maintenance approach of SAP Business Suite 7. Mainstream maintenance for SAP Solution Manager 7.2 is offered until the end of 2027. This applies for the Focused Build and Focused Insights add on as well. Extended maintenance is an option available until end of 2030 for selected functionality (see below). 

Customers who choose the optional extended maintenance for SAP Business Suite 7 (until end of 2030) will receive extended maintenance for SAP Solution Manager 7.2 at no additional cost.

Extended maintenance for SAP Solution Manager 7.2 only includes requirements management, project management, process management, test suite, change control management, IT service management (ITSM) and landscape management. For further details, see SAP Note 3255311.

SAP provide various offerings to support the transition from SAP Solution Manager to SAP Cloud ALM, like:

  • Readiness Check for SAP Cloud ALM
  • Transition Methodology to SAP Cloud ALM*
  • Roadmap and Implementation Services
  • Tools for selected data transfer of solution documentation and test cases*
  • APIs for data transfer and 3rd-party integration
  • Guidance for typical customer situations
  • “Transition to SAP Cloud ALM” page in the SAP Support Portal*

Entries marked with an *asterisk are planned to be provided in the future.

No. Customers with on-prem SAP maintenance agreements retain the perpetual license for SAP Solution Manager. They can continue using SAP Solution Manager after end of mainstream or extended maintenance.

SAP Solution Manager 7.2 will be supported beyond 2027/2030 – in customer specific maintenance (see restrictions in SAP Note 52505 and 305372).

SAP offers Extended Maintenance of SAP Solution Manager 7.2 to support customers in their transformation from SAP Business Suite to SAP S/4HANA. The purpose of this is to avoid customers need to switch their ALM platform during the migration project. Other functions of SAP Solution Manager will be available with customer-specific maintenance. For more information, please refer to SAP Note 3255311.

The support variant ‘SAP Standard Support’ is a traditional one, which applies to some customers only. SAP does not plan to include usage rights for SAP Cloud ALM in these maintenance agreements.

SAP Cloud ALM usage rights are included in SAP Cloud Service subscriptions, in SAP Enterprise Support, and Product Support for Large Enterprises only.

Customers have a perpetual license for SAP Solution Manager as part of their SAP on-premise maintenance agreements. They can continue using SAP Solution Manager beyond 2027/2030 under customer-specific maintenance.

We plan to keep the ABAP Stack on 7.40. It will remain in mainstream maintenance until December 31, 2027 and followed by optional extended maintenance. See also SAP Note 1648480.

SAP Focused Run

Increase the efficiency of IT operations and minimize the total cost of ownership with an advanced operation solution optimized to support highly scalable, secure, and efficient IT operations. Targeted for SAP-centric service providers and high-end hybrid customers, the SAP Focused Run solution monitors IT infrastructures, users, integrations and associated events, and business service management tools.

SAP Focused Run is a separate product on the SAP price list. All customers that license SAP Focused Run are entitled to use it.

SAP Focused Run is already available for both customers and Service providers.  For service providers it is the tool for hosting all their customers in one central platform for monitoring. And customers can use SAP Focused Run if they need advanced monitoring (scalability, AI/ML Use case today) and other advanced monitoring like single message monitoring in Integration Monitoring (millions of messages ) or real user monitoring (which is not available in SAP Solution Manager).

SAP Cloud ALM is intended for cloud-centric solutions. This means on-premise-centric solutions will be only covered to a certain degree. This means you should consider SAP Focused Run for end-user or integration scenarios covering on-prem and cloud-based components. SAP Cloud ALM for Operations should be considered for pure cloud-centric solutions.

Tricentis Test Automation for SAP

Our customers are looking for one test automation for the Intelligent Suite and their larger end-to-end customer solution including non-SAP. Neither Component-Based Test Automation (CBTA) in SAP Solution Manager nor the test automation tool in SAP S/4HANA Cloud are supporting all our cloud products holistically.

By entering a strategic partnership, SAP gets immediate access to all Tricentis Test Automation assets. All our on-premise SAP Enterprise Support customers get a free term license for Tricentis Test Automation for SAP integrated with SAP Solution Manager. By reselling Tricentis for an extended, non-SAP scope, customers get in combination with SAP Solution Manager or SAP Cloud ALM an enterprise-grade test suite.

Customers can benefit from one enterprise test solution with a strong service provider ecosystem. With our plan to make SAP internal test content available to customers in SAP Cloud ALM, customers will be able to accelerate their release regression testing. The partnership is very well received by our customer and partner ecosystem. 

SAP Cloud ALM will integrate both tools, the test automation from SAP S/4HANA Cloud and Tricentis. Tricentis will be able to automate other cloud products (SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Ariba, SAP Concur), which cannot be done with the SAP S/4HANA Cloud test automation tool. This provides a fantastic opportunity to our customers. But no one is forced to use it.

Partners

SAP PartnerEdge offers test and demo licenses. SAP Enterprise Support, cloud editions is included. This includes SAP Cloud ALM.

SAP Cloud ALM isn't prepared from technical as well as legal perspective for AMS partner business. This means in particular, you can't run multiple customers in a SAP Cloud ALM tenant owned by the AMS partner. Our clear recommendation is SAP Focused Run as platform for AMS providers.