Many companies move from SAP Solution Manager Monitoring and Alerting Infrastructure (MAI) to SAP Focused Run (FRUN). Basically, Focused Run is SolMan on steroids: it runs on the HANA database so it can handle a much larger load.
The requirement of integrating Focused Run and ServiceNow is becoming more and more frequent. Manually creating tickets for FRUN alerts is time consuming, cumbersome and prone to mistakes. This is where the ITSM Connector can help you:
integrate Focused Run and ServiceNow ITSM
Automatic incident creation
If you want to have a ServiceNow ticket to be created for a specific type of alert automatically, you can assign the ITSM Connector as the default Outbound Integration for that Monitoring Use Case:
Once this is set, any alerts of this Monitoring Use Case will have a ServiceNow incident created immediately. You can see in the Action Log of an alert that the ITSM Connector has created the ticket when the alert was created:
You can find the ServiceNow ticket number among the alert details and a hyperlink to it:
The generated incident
As you can see, the routing and categorization of the incident is fully automated. The incident category, subcategory are set, the business service is populated as well as the configuration item. This example uses self monitoring, so the CI is the FRUN system itself, but otherwise it will be the monitored system. Naturally you can configure what fields to fill and how to fill them.
The ticket is assigned to the support team you specify (most likely the SAP Basis team), so your service desk won’t have to route the ticket manually:
Additionally, there is an attachment that is generated by Focused Run and added to the incident by the ITSM Connector. This contains all important information about the problem and a link to the alert:
Semi-automated incident creation
If you want to have the freedom to decide when to create incidents, you can start the ticket creation manually:
In the next popup, select the ITSM Connector as the outbound integration:
As a result, you’ll see a notification:
Again, you’ll have the ticket link on the alert screen:
Bidirectional synchronization
Confirming the alert in Focused Run will automatically resolve the incident in ServiceNow:
The incident will get updated instantly:
All the details entered in Focused Run will be added to the ServiceNow Close Notes:
Also the other way around, if you close the incident in ServiceNow, it will confirm the alert in Focused Run:
You can see all the details in the action log: in the example below, the ticket was created manually and the alert was confirmed by closing the incident in ServiceNow:
Conclusion
You can have a “plug and play” integration between FRUN and ServiceNow by implementing the ITSM Connector. It is a certified ABAP Add-on that can be implemented in a very short time. No coding required at all.
The ITSM Connector is compatible with FRUN 3.0 and the new 4.0 too.
Next steps
Learn more at STA.
If you’d like to learn more about this solution, please get in touch at info@sta-technologies.com.
