Transition to SAP Cloud ALM for Operations

Transition to SAP Cloud ALM and monitor SAP Business Suite, SAP S/4HANA and cloud solutions from SAP.

Transition guidance per scenario

Transition to Business Process Monitoring in SAP Cloud ALM. It covers business process KPIs for cloud solutions from SAP, but also for SAP S/4HANA and SAP Business Suite.

Difference between SAP Solution Manager and SAP Cloud ALM

  • Business Process Monitoring in SAP Cloud ALM addresses business users only. For this reason technical KPIs related to job executions or interfaces are not part of it. These type of KPIs are addressed via specific monitoring use cases.
  • One of the targets of Business Process Monitoring in SAP Cloud ALM is to lower the setup effort. For this reason, modeled business processes are not a prerequisite anymore. The available business process KPIs are structured based on the SAP standard end-to-end business processes. Whether a certain KPI is relevant for a certain customer situation is auto-discovered. Filter options can be set selectively based on the received data, if required.
  • Business Process Monitoring in SAP Cloud ALM offers business process KPIs for the most relevant aspects for cloud-centric solutions. It is not our target to cover the complete scope currently available for SAP Solution Manager.
    Reasons for not supporting a certain KPI could be: 
    • It is a technical KPI
    • It is outdated and not relevant for a cloud centric solution
    • It is a "long tail" KPI delivered in a specific customers context

Transition to Integration Monitoring in SAP Cloud ALM to monitor and analyze the integration between cloud solutions from SAP and ABAP-based on-premise systems. Message monitoring for SAP Process Integration is planned to be covered. Support for other non-ABAP systems is not planned. 

Difference between SAP Solution Manager and SAP Cloud ALM

In SAP Solution Manager the functionality is available in different applications. In SAP Cloud ALM all functionalities are consolidated in one integration monitoring application. SAP Solution Manager provides only statistics regarding data volumes and error rates. SAP Cloud ALM collects single message artefacts to construct end-to-end message flows. This approach is much more detailed and powerful.

Transition to Exception Monitoring in SAP Cloud ALM to monitor and analyze single exceptions for cloud solutions from SAP and ABAP-based on-premise systems.

Difference between SAP Solution Manager and SAP Cloud ALM

In SAP Solution Manager the monitoring of single exceptions is covered by Exception Management, and providing exceptions statistics is covered by Exception Analysis. In SAP Cloud ALM this is merged into Exception Monitoring covering both aspects. Non-ABAP on-premise systems are not planned to be covered by SAP Cloud ALM. 

Transition to Synthetic User Monitoring in SAP Cloud ALM to monitor HTTP-based end-user activities. 

Difference between SAP Solution Manager and SAP Cloud ALM

SAP Solution Manager uses the simulation of HTTP and SAPGUI requests for User Experience Monitoring. SAP Cloud ALM leverages Selenium for Synthetic User Monitoring. Selenium is open source and allows simulation of end-user activities for dedicated front-ends like Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge instead of simulating HTTP or SAPGUI requests. 

SAP Cloud ALM does not support the monitoring of SAPGUI-based end-user activities and the simulation of RFC- or HTTP-based interface calls. 

Transition to Real User Monitoring.

Difference between SAP Solution Manager and SAP Cloud ALM

SAP Cloud ALM offers Real User Monitoring, it is not included in SAP Solution Manager. With Real User Monitoring customers can monitor user requests for cloud solutions from SAP and ABAP on-premise systems.

Non-ABAP on-premise systems and SAP Business Objects are not supported by SAP Cloud ALM. 

Dedicated Trace Analysis is not planned to be provided with SAP Cloud ALM. 

Transition to Job and Automation Monitoring in SAP Cloud ALM to monitor and analyze job executions and automation tasks for cloud solutions from SAP and ABAP-based on-premise systems including SAP Business Warehouse. 

Difference between SAP Solution Manager and SAP Cloud ALM

SAP Solution Manager covers the monitoring of Business Objects / Business Intelligence jobs. This is not available in SAP Cloud ALM. Furthermore, SAP Solution Manager provides specific performance statistics for SAP Business Warehouse. Similar functionality is not available in SAP Cloud ALM.

Non-ABAP on-premise systems are not covered by SAP Cloud ALM. 

Transition to Health Monitoring in SAP Cloud ALM to provide basic system monitoring for ABAP-based on-premise systems. 

Difference between SAP Solution Manager and SAP Cloud ALM

System monitoring in SAP Solution Manager is based on the Monitoring and Alerting Infrastructure (MAI) and comes with a powerful template management for both SAP-defined templates as well as customer-defined templates. The MAI infrastructure is not available in SAP Cloud ALM.

Mass maintenance in combination with pre-configured SAP-content is planned to be included in Health Monitoring in SAP Cloud ALM.

Only SAP HANA as database for ABAP systems is included in Health Monitoring.

Transition to Configuration and Security Analysis in SAP Cloud ALM to provide basic change analysis and validation functionality for cloud solutions from SAP and ABAP-based on-premise systems.

Difference between SAP Solution Manager and SAP Cloud ALM

Configuration and Security Analysis in SAP Cloud ALM provides analysis and validation of configuration items like technical parameters, software versions and patch levels. In SAP Solution Manger these aspects are available in several applications.

Transition to Alert Management to provide use-case-specific access to alerts including generic alert handling and search and analytics functionality.

Transition to Notification Management to simplify the way how notifications should be handled. 

Difference between SAP Solution Manager and SAP Cloud ALM

SAP Solution Manager provides a central and unified alert inbox across all monitoring use cases. With SAP Cloud ALM, use case - specific alert inboxes are directly embedded in the monitoring application to achieve a consistent user experience. Additionally, SAP Cloud ALM provides a dedicated event management called Intelligent Event Processing. This allows to generate events manually and to trigger associated downstream activities like e-mail notification or ticket generation as well as generic event correlation.

 

Transition to Business Service Management to manage status events (disruption, degradation, maintenance, communication) originated by SAP or customers.

Transition to Operations Automation and integrate SAP Build. 

Difference between SAP Solution Manager and SAP Cloud ALM

SAP Solution Manager provides Service Level Management including IT Calendar, Work Mode Management and Service Availability Management. All information is provided by the customer and is associated to services or systems. Business Service Management in SAP Cloud ALM is using information provided by SAP or customers and consolidates at business service level (collection of services and systems).

SAP Solution Manager uses the embedded guided procedure framework for operations automation. SAP Cloud ALM is relying on  SAP Build. 

Transition to customer-specific analytics based on analytics data exposed by the analytics APIs of SAP Cloud ALM. SAP Analytics Cloud as well as Grafana can be used as external analytics capabilities.

Difference between SAP Solution Manager and SAP Cloud ALM

SAP Solution Manager with Focused Insights provides pre-configured dashboard content which can be configured by customers without the need to add any coding. SAP Cloud ALM does not provide cross use-case analytics yet.

SAP Cloud ALM can be extended to provide customer-specific analytics via APIs. Out-of-the-box integration is provided for SAP Analytics Cloud and Grafana.

Transition to Service Delivery to facilitate collaboration and transparency along the entire end-to-end SAP service delivery process.

Difference between SAP Solution Manager and SAP Cloud ALM

  • SAP Solution Manager is no longer used for service delivery. SAP Cloud ALM is the new platform.

Functionality available in other services of SAP or out of scope

Data Consistency Management is part of SAP Solution Manager. It provides functionality like cross-database comparison, transactional correctness, business process completeness check, integration repository and single document search. Some aspects are overlapping with Integration Monitoring, for example the single document search. SAP has not decided yet, whether and to which degree this functionality will be provided in SAP Cloud ALM.

Business Process Improvement is part of SAP Solution Manager. It provides functionality like business process analytics, dependency diagrams, progress management board, automation rate dashboards, process flow insight and KPI catalog. SAP decided to package these functions in SAP Signavio Process Insights. Further information can be found here.

Job Scheduling Management is part of SAP Solution Manager. It provides functionality like central job overview, job schedule Gantt chart, job scheduling assistant, job request, job documentation and job scheduling (SMSE and XBP-based). SAP decided to package the job scheduling-related functions in SAP Build. Further information can be found here.

The monitoring-related functionalities like job overview are available in SAP Cloud ALM.

System Recommendations is part of SAP Solution Manager. It allows to identify missing software deliveries based on information provided by SAP Maintenance Planner. SAP decided to provide these functionalities with the system assistant in the maintenance planner. Further information can be found here.

IT Task Management is part of SAP Solution Manager. It provides functionality like tasks management and task planning. IT task management is based on IT service management functionality, which is not part of SAP Cloud ALM. Based on the existing and planned event-to-task interface an integration between SAP Cloud ALM and external task management systems like JIRA or ServiceNow can be established. 

Introscope (right-to-view version) is part of SAP Solution Manager. Further information can be found here.

It is not planned to provide Introscope as a data provider for SAP Cloud ALM. 

*This is the current state of planning and may be changed by SAP at any time.