Guided Procedures

Business-critical systems need to be monitored and maintenance tasks or processes must be performed on a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly or even exceptional or alert basis to safeguard the systems' stability and their related services availability.

Guided Procedures in SAP Solution Manager allow you to plan, execute and document recurring administrative tasks or processes and to solve or troubleshoot exceptions or alerts in a guided way.

 

Definition of "Guided Procedures"

Guided procedures in SAP Solution Manager consist of a set of step and sub-step procedures with one or more automatic and/or manually performed activities assigned to each step. Guided procedures can be executed multiple times for systems, hosts or databases. Each execution counts as an execution instance. While executing a guided procedure instance the results of the performed activities get documented into the log and shown by status indicators (green, yellow or red) in front of every activity and summarized in the related step following the worst-case rule.

Guided Procedures Applications

The Guided Procedures tools consists of the following applications:

  • Guided Procedure Catalog (formerly known as Guided Procedure Browser)
    The catalog of Guided Procedures provides the access to predefined SAP guided procedures, delivered within the SAP Solution Manager additional content package ST-CONT200, and to custom developed guided procedures.
  • Guided Procedure Authoring
    The authoring tool is providing an editor to easily develop, maintain and test individual customized guided procedures. In customized procedures reuse of parts of predefined guided procedures and use of so called SAP guided procedure plug-ins can be done.
  • Guided Procedure Planning Management
    Specific Guided Procedures can be planned and scheduled in the Planning Management to run fully automated without any manual human interaction.
  • Guided Procedure Scheduling (via IT Task Planning/Management)
    Guided Procedures can be scheduled in the IT Task planning to individual task for individual workers or teams inside of the IT Task Management. The scheduling can be done by coordinating workers or the individual workers themselves.
  • Guided Procedures Runtime
    The runtime environment is used to execute Guided Procedures for common or recurring tasks in the IT Task Management and to solve or trouble shoot exceptions or alerts.
  • Guided Procedures Usage (formerly known as Guided Procedure Log Book)
    The execution logs application shows all executed Guided Procedures including status information and comments by the procedure executor.

Where to use

Guided Procedures are assigned to one of the following application areas:

Application Area

Description

Technical   Administration

This area contains all guided procedures that describe day-to-day or ad hoc operational tasks to administrate your managed systems. The execution of the guided procedures can either be scheduled in advance, using IT task planning, and will appear in the task inbox of the assigned processors at the scheduled time, or they can be executed ad hoc from the guided procedure browser for the selected managed object.  

  

System Monitoring

This area contains all guided procedures to analyze and resolve system monitoring alerts. The execution of these guided procedures is usually triggered from the alert inbox in the context of a system monitoring alert.  

  

PI Monitoring

This area contains all guided procedures to analyze and resolve PI and message flow monitoring alerts. The execution of these guided procedures is usually triggered from the alert inbox in the context of a PI or message flow monitoring alert.  

  

Job Monitoring

This area contains all guided procedures to analyze and resolve job monitoring alerts. The execution of these guided procedures is usually triggered from the alert inbox in the context of a job monitoring alert.  

  

BI Monitoring

This area contains all guided procedures to analyze and resolve BI monitoring alerts. The execution of these guided procedures is usually triggered from alert the inbox in the context of a BI monitoring alert.  

  

Interface &   Connection Monitoring

This area contains all guided procedures to analyze and resolve Interface & Connection monitoring alerts. The execution of these guided procedures is usually triggered from the alert inbox in the context of an Interface & Connection Monitoring alert.  

  

End User Experience Monitoring

This area contains all guided procedures to analyze and resolve end user experience monitoring alerts. The execution of these guided procedures is usually triggered from the alert inbox in the context of an End user Monitoring alert.  

  

Where to be found

The Guided Procedures context area can be found in the SAP Solution Manager launchpad as the 'Guided Procedures' application area. Additionally, the ABAP transaction GPA_ADMIN can be used to access the main application Guided Procedure Catalog.

Guided Procedures context area in the SAP Solution Manager launchpad

Guided Procedures Templates

SAP delivers Guided Procedures Templates for common administration tasks as well as re-usable, configurable, automatic Guided Procedure Steps (Plug-ins) that can easily be customized and used in customer-defined guided procedures. These include:

  • Guided Procedure Templates for Common Administration Tasks
  • Guided Procedure Templates for Alert Resolution
  • Re-usable Guided Procedure Steps (Plug-ins)