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Function documentationService Availability Management

 

Service availability management (SAM) reports SLA-relevant downtimes of entities (technical systems on which business-critical business transactions are performed) based on data which is adjusted by system administrators to match the user experience. The data is confirmed by IT service managers or other supervisors. The adjusted downtime data is called service outages. SAP Solution Manager can be the single source of truth for Service Level Agreement (SLA) reporting of system downtimes.

To create service definitions, to maintain or confirm service outages, or to view and analyze availability details for systems, you access the service availability management application from the SAP Solution Manager launchpad.

Basic Functioning

With service availability management, confirmed service outages are created by a combination of automatic and manual activities:

  • Service availability management creates service outages automatically, based on the unplanned downtimes, as reported by the SAP Solution Manager monitoring and alerting infrastructure (MAI).

  • To adjust the measured data automatically, service availability management takes into account the planned downtimes defined in service availability definitions or in the SAP Solution Manager work mode management (WMM).

    Service availability management regards planned downtimes as not SLA relevant. Planned downtimes are planned in advance, and agreed between the customer and the service provider.

  • To decide whether a service outage is SLA relevant, service availability management matches the service outages with the agreed service times, the promised availability during service times as agreed in an SLA contract, for example according to a 24/7 or 10/5 schema.

  • To enable the application to compute the actual SLA-relevant availability of entities, service availability management allows you to adjust the data manually. Depending on the use case, you have the following options:

    • Change an automatically generated service outage

      Example Example

      A database failure causes a downtime: Depending on the data collection intervals from the monitoring and alerting infrastructure, the start and end of a measured downtime can be different from the real start and end time, as experienced by the end user. When the status of an availability alert changes from red to green, the system administrator is notified via e-mail and asked to change the service outage and adjust the maintenance time.

      End of the example.

      Example Example

      A downtime is caused by a new application program producing extraordinary system load. The system administrator of a service provider identifies the root cause and agrees with the end user to regard the service outage as not SLA relevant, because the IT infrastructure department is not responsible for the issue.

      End of the example.

    • Create new service outages to compensate for missing measurements

      Example Example

      For SAP Solution Manager a system which is located in the same local network, is available, but it is not available to the end user, due to a network connection breakdown between the system and the end users. On request of the end user, the system administrator creates an SLA-relevant service outage manually and informs the end user via e-mail that the service outage has been created.

      End of the example.

      Example Example

      The system administrator responsible for 24/7 service assumes that a maintenance activity will consume more time than agreed with the end users, which was 4 hours, for example. To avoid alerts being generated during the maintenance, in the work mode management (WMM) the system administrator extends the planned downtime, to 6 hours, for example. After the maintenance is finished, the system administrator is notified to enter the real start and end time of the maintenance activity in SAM. Depending on the actual time consumed, the system administrator does the following:

      • Less than agreed (3 hours, for example): A service outage is created automatically, based on the data from WMM, and a notification is sent. The system administrator adjusts the service outage to the 4 hours agreed planned downtime.

      • More than agreed, but less than defined in the work mode management (5 hours, for example): The system administrator adjusts the service outage created automatically, based on the data from work mode management, to 4 hours. For the additional hour, the system administrator creates a new service outage for the SLA-relevant unplanned downtime, manually.

      • More than defined in the work mode management (7 hours, for example): Two notifications are generated: by the work mode management and by MAI. The system administrator adjusts service outage created automatically, based on the data from work mode management, to 4 hours. For the additional 3 hours, the system administrator adjusts the MAI-generated SLA-relevant unplanned downtime.

      End of the example.

  • To report adjusted or manually created service outages, service availability management requires them to be confirmed, for example, at the end of an SLA reporting period.

    Example Example

    The services are provided within the same organization. The CIO confirms service outages in agreement with the persons responsible on the business departments, the Business Information Officer, for example.

    End of the example.

    Example Example

    The services are provided to external clients. The IT service manager of the service provider confirms service outages in agreement with the customer persons responsible.

    End of the example.

  • To display or create reports, you have the following options:

    • If the user has access to SAP Solution Manager, the availability and uptime of managed objects can be displayed graphically.

Prerequisites

  • You have set up the monitored systems in SAP Solution Manager Configuration (transaction solman_setup) in the Managed Systems Configuration.

  • You have authorization for service availability management. For more information, see the SAP Solution Manager Security Guide on SAP Service Marketplace, at Start of the navigation path http://service.sap.com/instguidesInformation published on SAP site Next navigation step SAP Components Next navigation step SAP Solution Manager Next navigation step <current release> End of the navigation path.

Features

The service availability management application provides the following tab pages:

  • Overview

    You can display the availability of the systems (entities) graphically. For more information, see Overview.

  • Outage Maintenance

    You can display, maintain, or confirm service outages. For more information, see Outage Maintenance.

  • Service Availability Management

    You can display, create, maintain and confirm service availability patterns. For more information, see Service Availability Definition.

  • Analysis

    You can display charts for analyzing service availability, for example, for viewing the system uptime. For more information, see Analysis.