Guided Procedures in Focused Run provide an easy way to document and optionally automate reoccurring operational activities as guided procedures. These guided procedures help the user to execute reoccurring administrative activities or alert reaction procedures in a guided and reproducible way. In addition, it is possible to automate the activities inside guided procedures and to execute them automatically without or with minimal manual involvement.

Guided procedures help 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 out of 1 or several steps. Each step has 1 or multiple activities. The following different activity types are supported:

• Manual activities consist out of a description, a documentation text that describes detailed what the user must do and optionally a context sensitive navigation link into the relevant application in Focused Run or the managed system. The user processing manual activities can read the documentation, 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 background. Once executed they return a log message indicating success or failure of the activity and optionally a table, or other graphics with more details. Automatic activities can be triggered by a user. Guided procedures with automatic activities can be executed fully automatic in 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 own guided procedures
• Custom step activities or Plug-in Step activities are Webdynpro applications that can be reused in guided procedures to execute complex tasks which require user input. Currently no custom step activities or Plug-in step activities are delivered with Focused Run FP2 but it is possible to define customer specific custom steps.

The result of a guided procedure execution can be exported into a HTML result report and sent via e mail.

Guided Procedures for Advanced System Management (ASM)

Guided Procedures for Advanced System Management allow to define and automate regular administrative tasks.

One example for this is the "System Health Check for ABAP Systems" . It performs several health checks on ABAP systems and sends out a result report with all findings to interested parties. It can be executed manually or scheduled to be executed automatically in regular intervals.