Category: SAP Solution Manager

Automatic SAP Note search for IT service management


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Automatic SAP Note search for IT service management

Get a list of relevant SAP Notes attached to your incidents

Whenever you encounter an incident in SAP, the first thing to do is to check if it is a problem in the standard SAP code or in your custom developments. If it is a standard SAP problem, your SAP analysts will look for a relevant SAP Note (correction or knowledge base article) using the support website of SAP. 

SAP has realized that this is a task that can be automated in some cases. They have introduced automatic SAP Note search for three distinct scenarios: 

  • Automated Note Search Tool (ANST) – a tool that allows SAP end users or analysts to make a “recording” of the incident (reproduce the issue) and perform a search based on the execution logs
  • Performance Assistant Note and KBA Search (PANKS) – which performs a search based on the error message details
  • Runtime errors (short dumps – ST22) – a search button is added which uses the problematic source code position as a search criteria

However, these tools are not integrated with external ITSM platforms or SAP Solution Manager Service Desk. All of them require manual execution and some sort of technical expertise from the end user.

Our Ticket System for SAP can perform an automatic SAP Note search and attach the list of relevant SAP Notes to tickets created in an external ITSM tool or in SAP Solution Manager Service Desk.

Attach SAP Note search results to tickets

The core feature of our SAP add-on is that SAP end users can submit errors directly from SAP to any ticketing tool and the program attaches all relevant information to the created ticket. This is now further enhanced with the results of the automatic SAP note search attached as an HTML file.

The SAP end user does not need to do anything, everything happens in the background. Simply submit an error report from SAP as usual.

How does the search work?

Our add-on uses the built-in functionality to search for SAP Notes (requires basis release 7.00 or later). The search criteria is constructed from the following elements:

  • Subject line contents for a full-text search (optionally together with the current transaction code)
  • Components of the SAP system with versions taken into account
  • Application component of the problematic screen
  • Implementation status in the current system

This allows the program to retrieve SAP Notes that are relevant for the affected SAP system and running program, without displaying SAP Notes that are already implemented or are not valid for your SAP component version.

Manual search

Advanced users can override the automatic search manually by pressing a button on the main screen. That will call a SAP Note search report where they can change the filter criteria as they want and attach the results of their manual search instead of the automatic one.

Benefits

All this will result in less manual effort and often a quicker ticket resolution, as the solution may be attached already to the generated ticket.

Videos

Next steps

Schedule a demo

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Download a free trial

Get a free 30-day trial and test the product in your own SAP systems.

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Integrate ServiceNow and SAP Solution Manager Monitoring and Alerting Infrastructure

Integrate ServiceNow and SAP Solution Manager Monitoring and Alerting Infrastructure

Create ServiceNow incidents when Solution Manager alerts are triggered

Integrate ServiceNow and SAP SolMan

Many companies use SAP Solution Manager to monitor their SAP and non-SAP systems and for business process monitoring too. However, a lot of them do not use the Service Desk module of Solution Manager. Instead, they use ServiceNow for IT service management.

A common request is to integrate the two platforms to leverage the benefits of both worlds.

Set up monitoring in Solution Manager

Once you have configured the monitoring in SolMan (which is not in the scope of this blog post), all you need to do is to specify our SAP add-on as a third party connector for your alerts. After setting this, you are ready to forward your alerts to ServiceNow. You just need to define which alerts you want to forward based on managed object type and name, alert severity, rating and other fields. In a simple customization screen, you can define which alerts to forward. Using a custom ABAP logic, you can map ServiceNow field values (priority, severity etc.) to the properties of Solution Manager alerts (rating, severity etc.). Finally, some basic configuration is needed to connect your SolMan and ServiceNow systems (assign text templates to alerts, set up RFC connection to ServiceNow etc.).

Let’s see it in action

Now it’s time to see how this works. We have made a lot of effort to trigger as many alerts as we could in order to have many entries in our SolMan Alert Inbox. Whenever an alert pops up in the Alert Inbox, a ServiceNow incident is created automatically, without any human effort. ServiceNow fields are set according to the configuration in SAP, incident description and short text contain meaningful information and even direct links to relevant SAP transactions. This allows your service desk to take immediate action to analyze the problem and to provide a solution faster.

Additional benefits

The obvious benefits of this integration are reduced human effort, quicker reactions to alerts and maximizing the ROI on your investments in ServiceNow and SAP Solution Manager. However, there is more than that! All relevant SAP information is added to custom ServiceNow tables. Details of the affected SAP system (managed object), alert, event and all metrics are saved in ServiceNow and displayed on the incident form as a related list. Clicking on one item, you can get all details that can help you to understand the problem and to provide a solution faster.

We also deliver a dashboard on SAP related incidents with a tabsheet dedicated to incidents raised for Solution Manager alerts. This allows you to find trends, identify bottlenecks and better plan your resources by providing insights into your monitored systems and processes.

 

Videos

You can watch how the integration works in the video below.

Next steps

Schedule a demo

Let’s make a conference call and show you how our products work and answer all your questions.

Let's have a demo

Download a free trial

Get a free 30-day trial and test the product in your own SAP systems.

Download now

Get in touch

Still have questions? Do not hesitate to contact us and get them answered.

Contact us

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SAP Solution Manager Service Desk integration

SAP Solution Manager Service Desk integration

Enrich your support tickets with screenshots, authorization reports and more

Enhance SAP SolMan Service Desk

See how simply you can enhance your SAP Solution Manager Service Desk processes by adding extra attachments to your support messages automatically.

The complete technical and business context of the problem is attached to every support message you create. This provides great benefits for your support teams and helps them fix problems much faster.

Additionally, if you forward support messages with all this extra information to SAP, you can expect a quicker solution for your problems.

This post will describe how you can boost your SAP support without disrupting existing processes.

What is STA Ticket System?

It is an add-on for SAP systems that must be installed on the SAP application server. It extends the SAP GUI with a menu item that allows users to report errors directly from the screen where the error happened. It works with R/3 based SAP systems that use the SAP Netweaver platform (for example SAP ECC, SAP BW) and the latest S/4 HANA systems as well.

Your existing connections between your Solution Manager system and other SAP systems are not changed in any way. Installing the add-on to the Solution Manager system is not required unless you want to enrich error reports in the SolMan system as well.

Create support messages from the SAP GUI

If you already use SAP Solution Manager Service Desk and your SAP users create Support Messages using the Help menu in SAP GUI, the product will add one or two extra steps before submitting the ticket to SAP Solution Manager. You configure the program to skip these steps or not. The process is simple:

When you press “Create Support Message” in the Help menu, first our add-on will ask for confirmation to take a screenshot. You may choose not to add if there is any sensitive information on the screen. Later, you can add the screenshot manually if you have hidden all sensitive information using an image editor. It is possible to omit this step (you can disable it in the global configuration of the product), but it is highly recommended to keep this in place.

After you press “Save/Send” on the standard SAP popup window, the main screen of STA Ticket System appears where you fill any additionaly fields.

Just before the standard SAP functionality creates the support message in SolMan, our add-on will collect all relevant information regarding the SAP system, SAP user and currently running program and attach them to the support message. It will additionally attach the screenshot (if taken), an authorization report for the current user and optionally a shortcut to the transaction where the error occurred.

All this extra information provides enormous benefit to the service desk staff. There is no need to clarify every missing detail with the caller to be able to start solving the problem. This may save days of waiting for clarification for multinational companies especially if SAP support is outsourced.

Add your own fields

You can add your custom fields that can be set by SAP end users to the customer subscreen part of the main screen of STA Ticket System. You may add fields like impact, urgency, severity, support group, tags etc.

Whatever fields you add here will be added to the Solution Manager support message too as part of a generated PDF.

Benefits

Your support staff will have all information about the problem immediately, so they won’t need to contact the user who reported the error to clarify all details. They can start to work on solving the problem instantly without having to wait for clarification. This results in a significant reduction in ticket resolution time.

If you forward support messages to SAP with all the additional information, you’ll likely to end up with a faster solution for your problem because SAP support will have less communication steps with you.

At the end all this translates to a significant cut of SAP maintenance costs and other indirect benefits, like job satisfaction and less system downtime.

SAP SolMan integration videos

You can see the full installation and some real-life examples here:

Learn more about our Ticket System

Next steps

Schedule a demo

Let’s make a conference call and show you how our products work and answer all your questions.

Let's have a demo

Download a free trial

Get a free 30-day trial and test the product in your own SAP systems.

Download now

Get in touch

Still have questions? Do not hesitate to contact us and get them answered.

Contact us

Sharing is caring