Working with an offsite SAP delivery mechanism can be challenging. With remote support services, potential time zone issues, and possible cultural and communication differences, optimizing the overall organizational delivery can provide additional obstacles. Some delivery obstacles — such as the recycling of ABAP development objects due to misunderstanding caused by distance, or missed delivery dates due to the lack of 100% accurate functional specifications — exist as real-life delivery challenges facing organizations interested in using offsite SAP delivery.

However, by properly defining delivery service level agreements (SLAs) and change management procedures through the integration of management and operational tools, you can optimize your remote SAP services mechanism to change overall productivity dramatically. In fact, many tools (both SAP and non-SAP) can assist in optimizing your operational services.

I discuss several tools that help your organization drive SAP initiatives via an offsite delivery model. These tools include the central system administration (CSA) and central system monitoring in SAP Solution Manager as well as non-SAP work productivity tools, such as VersionOne and Microsoft Project. Because these tools provide an operational administration framework and standards, using them can provide insight and reporting into the activities that your SAP offsite delivery mechanism is performing. To get the most out of this article, you should have a general understanding of the ASAP Implementation Roadmap.

CSA Overview 

In short, CSA is a central repository for all SAP NetWeaver administration activities. You can access CSA via the Solution Overview within your given SAP solution landscape. To get to CSA, you first must use the transaction SOLUTION_MANAGER (or DSWP) and then select (double-click) the landscape you would like to work with. Next, select the Solution Monitoring tab, then the System Monitoring/Administration tab. The icon with a notepad and a plus sign represents a system with open tasks to be completed.  

Figure 1 shows one of the specific CSA tasks, Jobs: Checking Background Jobs, which is pre-delivered with SAP tasks. As you can see, within this task lies a whole host of both execution and reporting capabilities. Note that this example is merely one task in a multitude of both standard SAP and custom possibilities.

Figure 1

The Checking Background Jobs administration activity

CSA documents all the tasks that your SAP NetWeaver team should perform on a regular basis, such as checking background jobs, short dumps, or client-specific tasks such as custom interface execution. CSA allows you to see if the activities have been performed and when they were executed (date/time). In addition, you can add administrator notes that allow your SAP NetWeaver administrators to document their activities and findings.

If you are using an offsite delivery mechanism to support your SAP NetWeaver platform, you must implement CSA. While not an SAP-mandated requirement, it is definitely good SAP operational practice. Using CSA as a best practice provides you both visibility into your offsite delivery team’s activities and indicates that greater accountability is expected. These expectations — defined as SLAs — and measureable metrics help provide the proper framework and working relationship with your offsite delivery provider. Defining and agreeing upon SLAs ensures that cost and consequences are clear to both customer and vendor. Table 1 shows the main benefits of using CSA.

Table 1

Benefits of using CSA for offsite delivery

Central System Monitoring Overview

Figure 2 shows another SAP Solution Manager tool, central system monitoring (CSM), which allows your organization to better understand the health of your systems. Use transaction RZ20 to access CSM or you can use SAP NetWeaver Administrator, if configured.

Figure 2

View your system status in CSM

CSM provides operational system information that is crucial to the effectiveness of your overall SAP environment. Real-world examples include:

• Use CSM to proactively monitor when a user account is locked. Notify end users before they contact you.
• Monitor the available disk space on the file system, specifically the disk available for database growth
• Using the latest Computing Center Management System (CCMS) agents available, you can monitor Web services and Web applications. The Java landscape is no longer a black box.

By using CSM, you can control all the monitoring, corresponding configuration, and setup via a central location.

CSM is a holistic CCMS, which means that instead of performing CCMS activities on each of your organization’s respective environments (by landscape or by product), CSM acts as the central hub with visibility to all CCMS activities. CSM provides your SAP NetWeaver team valuable connectivity, availability (are all the systems up and running?), and quality (are users able to access these systems?) metrics.

Based on how you configure CSM, you can use a number of alerting mechanisms for proactive information gathering and resolution. The standard SAP system offers many alert monitoring sets. The three types of agents CSM uses are:

• CCMS4X: Agent used for the ABAP system
• CCMSR: Agent used for Java or Java+ABAP systems
• CCMSPING: Agent used for availability monitoring

Based on the alert settings configured, your organization can see vital statistics on your landscape. Examples include security oversight, disk space, and J2EE components.

Security Oversight

With CSM, you can use the CCMS agents to monitor cross-application system logs focused on security events. If a user account gets locked, the system writes an entry to the system log (transaction SM21). If you use a monitoring agent for the system log, it picks up all activity in real time, which can trigger an email alert. The recipient of the alert could be whomever your organization deems necessary — for example, a security administration distribution list could be alerted for immediately resolve the problem. This is a proactive tool to monitor potential system attacks if several user accounts get locked at the same time.

Disk Space

Disk space is valuable, especially concerning the space allocated to SAP system transaction logs. In fact, overloaded transaction logs can prove to be critical. If a transaction log logical disk fills up, transactions within the SAP system come to a grinding halt and slow down your business.

By proactively configuring trigger alerts focused on monitoring disk space, the system can send out automated alerts to the proper SAP NetWeaver Basis administration team members (or distribution list). These alerts act as a mechanism merely to identify issues. It is the responsibility of your appropriate SAP operational team members to follow through with task resolution.

CCMS Agents

Several standard CCMS agents are available with the standard CSM. Whether employing real-time or batch interface programs, it is important to know if the sending and receiving systems are both available. Many organizations have sophisticated customer and vendor Web-based applications that are critical to running their business. Failure to have any part of the interface work properly could affect the business. CCMS agents provide insight into where issues exist, so you can redesign the interface to eliminate future issues.

Manpower Delivery Activity

To ensure that your offsite delivery mechanism is performing to its highest potential, an organization should employ a method to manage and track service delivery and manpower effort. (This philosophy holds true regardless of whether an organization is working with an offsite model or handling all the work effort internally.) This manpower activity effort is enhanced greatly with work management tools. Formal tools to document, track, and assign responsibility are crucial to the successful delivery of SAP implementation and operational deliverables. Specific examples include using Microsoft Project to capture deliverable timelines; using SAP Solution Manager to capture deliverable status updates; and working with manpower resource balancing tools, such as VersionOne, to maintain reasonable and manageable work efforts.

Table 2 lists several leading tools that have proven effective for managing SAP offsite efforts.

Table 2

Tools to help manage your work effort

Yosh Eisbart

Yosh Eisbart is an SAP veteran with more than 15 years of experience. He has been involved in global SAP implementations since the days of SAP R/2. Yosh has been instrumental in the architecture, design, rollout, and support of global delivery centers and centers of excellence (COE). Furthermore, Yosh has also played the role of integration manager driving COE activity and production support optimization.

You may contact the author at yosheisbart@benimbl.com.

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