Category: ServiceNow

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

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

Download a free trial

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

Get in touch

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

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Integrate ServiceNow and SAP Solution Manager Monitoring and Alerting Infrastructure

Create ServiceNow incidents when Solution Manager alerts are triggered

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.

Download a free trial

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

Get in touch

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

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Scoped Application for ServiceNow – SAP integration

ITSM Connector for SAP

Display all SAP ticket details in ServiceNow

Does your IT service desk lose time due to extra communication because of incomplete error reports? Now we have a convenient solution for you to display all SAP-specific information in ServiceNow so your support technicians do not have to to waste time to clarify all the details of the problem.

Additionally, having all technical details saved to ServiceNow tables, you can do advanced analytics of your SAP incidents using the capabilities of standard ServiceNow reports and dashboards.

The app is available as a free download from the ServiceNow Store.

ServiceNow App with a custom REST API endpoint

In addition to our SAP add-on we have developed a ServiceNow application that allows to add all SAP-related details to your incidents. This includes all technical details (like SAP system, program and user details) as well as the business context (all screen field values). Once you have all this information available directly from the incident screen, much less communication is required between the caller and the assigned support expert.

This scoped application provides a REST API endpoint that can be called to store all this information. Naturally our SAP add-on already contains this feature so you can create ServiceNow incidents directly from SAP and get your ServiceNow tables populated.

Advanced analytics of SAP incidents

Another great result of having all this data in ServiceNow is that you can use the built-in reporting and dashboarding features of ServiceNow. You can blend the information from standard tables (incidents etc.) and the custom tables that hold SAP data. This provides you the possibility to analyze your SAP incident flow like never before.

We deliver preconfigured reports and dashboards so you can get instant insights into your SAP incident flow.

Easy installation

Since ServiceNow introduced the application scope concept, installation is very easy and safe. Our product is delivered in its own namespace and follows the usual application lifecycle – deployment first in the development system and then in test and production systems.

Benefits

There are advantages for all parties involved in SAP incident handling. Support technicians can spend more time on actually solving problems than clarifying all missing details with the users who report the incidents. IT support team leads can analyze SAP-related incidents using a modern BI platform that ServiceNow provides. SAP end users can spare time too due to the quick and convenient ticket creation from the SAP user interface. Most importantly, everybody will be happy to see an improvement of KPIs because of all these benefits.

Video

Get an overview of the solution by watching 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.

Download from the ServiceNow Store

Get the certified app from the ServiceNow Store.

Get in touch

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

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Integrate ServiceNow and SAP

Create ServiceNow incidents directly from SAP

Learn how conveniently you can connect your SAP and ServiceNow systems using STA Ticket System.

The most significant feature of this integration is that the complete technical and business context is attached to all incidents created from SAP. This brings immense value for your support staff and helps them solve problems much faster.

This post will describe integration using both Inbound Email Actions and the REST API of ServiceNow to create incidents.

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.

Benefits

Create incidents from the SAP GUI

Your SAP end-users can report errors right from the SAP GUI so there is no need pick up the phone, write emails or to open a browser window and log into ServiceNow to create the incident manually. The process is simple:

SAP users can start STA Ticket System in the transaction where the error occurred using the System menu. After that, the main screen appears where they can enter a description of the problem and fill the ServiceNow fields. This part of the screen can be customized so you can include all your custom ServiceNow fields as well.

Press “Send” when finished to create the Incident in ServiceNow. The program will collect all relevant information regarding the SAP system, SAP user and currently running program and attach them to the generated incident in ServiceNow. It will additionally attach a screenshot, an authorization report for the current user and optionally a shortcut to the transaction where the error happened.

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 ServiceNow fields

You can add your custom fields used in ServiceNow to the customer subscreen part of the main screen of STA Ticket System. Additionally you can implement any special business logic you require, like filling fields with default values etc. We provide a template that you can use right out of the box, simply copy and modify it to include your own business logic. Your own ABAP developers can do this or we can provide consulting services to implement everything you need.