Setting Up Service Availability Monitoring

To set up Service Availablity Monitoring, plan and perform the following:

Create users who are responsible for the following:
- maintain service outages
- confirm service outages
- report the service availability figures in the SAM dashboard
Define the technical components in scope and parameters, such as the threshold values for the availability of managed objects.
To enable SAM to notify the persons in charge to check and maintain service outages, assign a business partner.
Define agreed service times.

Caution Caution

For technical reasons (to avoid inconsistencies), the agreed service times can only be defined for the present and future. They cannot be defined in the past.

When you add a new managed object, add it to the SAP Solution Manager landscape and configure it in the SAM set-up, before the SLA contract start date in the SAM set-up.

End of the caution.

Prerequisites

You have authorization to configure SAM in the SAP Solution Manager Configuration work center. For more information, see the SAP Solution Manager Security Guide on SAP Help Portal at http://help.sap.com/solutionmanager .

Procedure

Perform the following process steps:

Maintaining Business Partners

Administrators responsible for managed objects, or other persons, can be notified when MAI system availablity alerts change from red to green. This reminds them to check the real start and end time of a downtime, and adjust the automatically created service outage in SAM. To enable notifications, the LMDB administrator assigns business partners to each managed system to be monitored. For more information, see Maintaining a Business Partner. These notifications are also available for maintenance and planned downtime activities scheduled in the work mode management.

Defining Parameters

A guided procedure helps you to set up SAM. The following overview of the steps to be performed informs you about the information needed to implement your SAM scenario with the guided procedure.

To start the guided procedure, in the Solution Manager Configuration work center, choose the Service Availability Monitoring scenario.
In the Configure Infrastructure step, perform the following job scheduling activities:
- Import service outages from MAI
- Import planned downtimes from work mode management.
- Delete service outages whose retention tine has expired.
In the Global Settings step, do the following:
- Adapt the Maximal SAM retention/storage period: period of time after which a service outage is deleted. By default, data is deleted after 15 months. If a lot of outages occur, reduce the value.
- Under Infrastructure, do the following:
  1. In the Send notifications to field, select the partner function of the business partner to whom notifications are to be sent. For more information, see Maintaining a Business Partner.
  2. In the Send notifications to field, select any business partner with a e-mail address.
- Recommended: Define reusable agreed time patterns. The agreed service time patterns can also be maintained by the administrator responsible for the managed object, and to maintain service outages.
  For more information, see Creating a Service Time Pattern.
In the Create Template Users step, to implement your SAM role concept, assign the appropriate authorizations to the users in your SAM scenario.

Example
Implement the following roles: system administrator maintaining service outages, IT service manager confirming service outages, business information officer displaying SAM reporting data.

End of the example.
In the Define Scope step, select the systems to be monitored.
In the Setup SAM Reporting, do the following:
1. Maintain the following parameters:
  - SLA Threshold (%): Specify the promised availability of a managed object, measured in percentage. Enter a value between 0 and 100. Use a dot (.) as the decimal point.
    
    Example
    Enter 99.5 for 99.5% promised availability.
    
    This means: The SLA is met if the managed object is available for 99.5% of the agreed service times (in minutes). For more information, see Scheduling Agreed Service Times.
    
    End of the example.
    
    The SLA threshold is displayed in the SAM dashboard, to allow comparison with the current availability of a managed object and to identify managed objects which do not meet the SLA.
  - SLA period (months): Specify the reporting period, 1 or 12 months.
  - SLA Valid From: Enter the start date of the SLA contract in the DD.MM.YYYY format.
    To round off the periods, enter the first day of the current month.
  - Enable SAM Reporting: Select the checkbox. Deselect it if the SAM data is no longer needed, and is to be deleted from the database.
  - Enable Sending Notifications: The business partners with the selected partner function are notified about new service outages.
    Deselect it if no notification is required. For more information about creating a business partner, see Maintaining a Business Partner.
2. Optional. To schedule the agreed service times, in the Maintain Agreed Service Time column, choose the link.
  
  Note
  The link is only active if the system is new. To maintain an existing system, go to the Service Availability Management scenario. For more information, see Scheduling Agreed Service Times (AST).
  
  End of the note.
  
  Note
  The agreed service times can also be maintained by the administrator responsible for the managed object.
  
  For more information, see Scheduling Agreed Service Times.
  
  End of the note.