You've finally decided to look beyond Solution Manager - here's what you have been missing
The end is near! That’s right, mainstream support for SAP ECC will be ending in 2027. While this is fairly well known what is less obvious is that this also includes support for SAP Solution Manager. Let’s be honest though, the functional end of life for Solution Manager happened quite a while ago.
Why Solution Manager falls short in today’s hybrid SAP environments
Solution Manager is far behind the market in terms of capabilities when compared feature for feature with 3rd party solutions. It just isn’t good enough anymore, given it doesn’t support the next generation of hybrid deployments well, and certainly doesn’t support customers looking for a single solution across ECC, S/4HANA, RISE and BTP. Even its successor; Cloud ALM, falls short here as well. Even worse, without service and support, Solution Manager might face an unplanned demise due to an incompatibility or security issue for reasons yet unknown.
The case for moving beyond Solution Manager to enhance SAP operations
Many have settled on Solution Manager as a default choice for SAP operations. Maybe initially it was sufficient, and taking advantage of better solutions for managing SAP wasn’t pressing. But with the end of Solution Manager imminent, there’s an opportunity to improve SAP operations, reducing the cost, downtime and complexity of doing so, even as one embarks on complex migration projects and runs SAP in multiple locations for a while.
Solution Manager covers a broad range of management functionality well beyond the scope of this article. So it’s helpful to pick a specific area then compare what a best of breed solution provides vs. SAP standard in Solution Manager and what that means for SAP operations. One of the most used capabilities in Solution Manager is the monitoring capability. When comparing Solution Manager to Avantra; a highly regarded SAP observability and automation solution, we can really see the difference.
|
Function |
Solution Manager |
|
|
Landscape Support |
Primarily an on-premise solution, with limited RISE support. |
Integrated support across on-premise, cloud & RISE. |
|
ITSM Integration |
Wait, there’s tools people use other than SAP? |
Integrated ITSM support for Service Now and other ITSM solutions. |
|
Automation |
Limited automated response |
Fully automated response, including robust AI-driven automated actions to prevent downtime. |
|
Predictive analytics |
None, basic monitoring only with manually set simple range thresholds for issue detection. |
Monitoring includes automated analysis and forecasting, with AIOps engine for automatically learning the environment and detecting operational anomalies. |
|
HotNews Analysis |
No HotNews analysis |
With a direct API connection to the SAP support backbone, Avantra can alert you which of your systems are impacted by which notes as soon as the security notes are released |
|
Audit compliance |
No audit readiness |
Avantra is observing many of the standard, best practice, audit controls out of the box. Your specific organizations policies can also be added and together can be alerted up and/or embedded in automated pdf based reports |
|
Setup and ongoing maintenance |
Complex implementation and upgrades and will soon be out of standard maintenance |
Automated implementations and near zero downtime for upgrades. Maintenance is included in cost and solution has a lengthy roadmap. |
How automation and AI elevate SAP operations beyond Solution Manager
Solution Manager works, but it’s clunky, takes many man hours to maintain, and is a long way from state of the art. An SAP operations team using a best of breed solution would expect to support a complex, hybrid environment with just one solution on a single pane of glass, integrating with existing ITSM platforms managing more than just SAP. Additionally, it would automate system responses to conditions, identify operational risk, and leverage AI to automatically adapt and configure the solution to a specific environment. That’s a big difference, and in labor and operational downtime prevention alone the cost is easily justified.
And we’ve only just scratched the surface. Across the range of Solution Manager capabilities, 3rd party solutions consistently outperform Solution Manager, offering more robust capabilities. Many SAP customers have already discovered this fact, but with the end of support for Solution Manager drawing near, many more will be compelled to look around for alternatives. They are in for pleasant discoveries.
If something better than Solution Manager for SAP operations is what you have in mind for your environment, Avantra 25 and Avantra AIR provide solutions for AIOps specifically for SAP.
Talk with one of our SAP experts today to find out more.