Operations Automation for System Management
"Operations Automation for System Management" provides an easy way to document and optionally automate reoccurring operation flows as guided procedures. They help the user to execute reoccurring operational activities in a guided and reproducible way. In addition, it is possible to automate the activities inside guided procedures and to execute them automatically with or without minimal manual involvement.
Operations Automation helps to reduce TCO and improve IT operations quality through:
- Step-by-step execution
- Detailed activity description
- Central access to required managed system functions
- Automation
- Logging of every activity
- Predefined content that can be customized
A guided procedure consists of one or several steps. Each step has one or multiple activities. The following different activity types are supported:
- Manual activities consist of a description, a documentation text that describes, in detail, what the user must do and, optionally, a context sensitive navigation link into the relevant application in SAP Focused Run or the managed system. The user processing manual activities can read the documentation and open the navigation link to jump into the relevant application to execute the activity. Once the activity is executed, the user needs to document this by changing the status and, optionally, writing a comment.
- Automated or plug-in activities. Automated activities execute certain predefined tasks automatically in the background. Once executed, they return a log message indicating success or failure of the activity and, optionally, a table or other graphic with more details. Automatic activities can be triggered by a user. Guided procedures with automatic activities can be executed fully automatically in the background. SAP delivers a set of plug-in activities that can be customized and plugged into customer defined guided procedures. It is also possible to develop customer specific automated activities in ABAP and plug them into your own guided procedures.
The result of a guided procedure execution can be exported into a result report and sent via e mail. For the result report the following formats are supported: HTML or Microsoft Word.