How to make the most out of Workload Automation and SAP Solution Manager

SAP Solution Manager is a central support and system management suite. With the aim to address questions like … ​

Job Management comprises several applications to establish standardized, formal processes in order to support the management of centralized end-to-end solution wide background operations, i.e. 
    Processes for requesting new jobs, job changes or deletion of jobs 
    Documentation and central scheduling of jobs 
    Central monitoring of jobs and error handling in case of failures  

Job Management is one of the elements of the Run SAP like a Factory - concept. ​

In a SAP system landscape is common to include many installed SAP and non-SAP systems and SAP Solution Manager is intended to reduce complexity and centralize the management of these systems and end-to-end business processes.  ​

It helps to minimize risks and to reduce total cost of ownership. SAP Solution Manager runs in the solution landscape facilitating the technical support of the distributed systems. SAP Solution Manager is a lifecycle management platform used to implement, run, and optimize SAP applications.  ​

The SAP Solution Manager supports the following scenarios: 

1. Service Desk 
2. Implementing and Upgrading SAP Solutions 
3. Job Management
4. Change Management 
5. Solution Monitoring 
6. SAP Services & Support 
7. Root Cause Analysis 

Workload Automation provides integration with the SAP Solution Manager to enable users to manage and monitor jobs from within SAP’s Solution Manger Job Scheduling Management solution.  
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This integration is based on SAP SMSE interface. 

SMSE (Solution Manager Scheduling Enabler) enables communication from Solution Manager to external scheduling tools 

• Schedule jobs from Solution Manager in external scheduler ​
• Document jobs from external scheduler in Solution Manager 
• Monitor jobs from external scheduler in Solution Manager ​

Introducing the following benefits: 

• Reduce the cost and complexity. 
• Eliminate the need to manually define Workload Automation jobs into SAP Solution Manager. 

• Reduce operational cost associated with scheduling and monitoring jobs. 
• Increase operator's efficiency with automation of jobs and job chain management. 
• Enable the documentation of jobs defined in Workload Automation. 

 
Addressing the following company’s challenges. 

• Require maintaining extensive job documentation to improve business efficiencies. 
• Avoid additional effort and costs to train users on multiple scheduling engines. 
• Companies, must manage heterogenous landscape, requiring to automating SAP and non-SAP workloads. 

 
Standard scheduling versus External Scheduling 

• Central place for scheduling 
• One scheduling entity for all system 
• Ability to schedule on SAP and non SAP systems  ​
  

• Build complex scenarios with dependencies ​
  

Workload Automation plugged as external scheduler in Solution Manager will … 
… extend scheduling capabilities 
… reduce training users effort related to multiple scheduling engines. 
… centralize job’s documentation. 
… increase the ability to manage and monitor business processes. ​

Move in the action in three steps … 
​
1) registering the master domain manager on SAP Solution Manager ​

 2) scheduling ​

 3) monitoring ​

​Want to learn more?  
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Visit the Workload Automation website, explore SAP topics on the WA community, take a look at Worklod Automation on the SAP App Center or drop me an email at [email protected] to talk about how to move your SAP & automation game to the next level! ​

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Author's Bio

Marco Borgianni, Senior Technical Specialist, HCL Technologies

Marco Borgianni working as Senior Technical Specialist as part of HCL services team for Workload Automation area, in the HCL Software business unit. Marco been working in the Workload Automation area since 2000 joining in IBM software Laboratory and covering several roles starting as a developer, tester, Level 3 support specialist and customer solution provider. In all these roles Marco continuously worked with ERP and Business Intelligence software especially with SAP. Nowadays I'm acting as integration architect to ERP's system especially with SAP and others player in this market.