Application Management for Cloud Based Solutions

[ErikEbertDK]

In my humble opinion most leading enterprise cloud solution providers has been pretty open about planned maintenance, system outages, incidents and historical trends. But it has been hard to keep track as information is often been spread among different channels, web pages, email distribution lists, support portal. Once you were ”in the loop” all was fine; but it was hard to get there and you had to keep your own browser bookmarks updated.

Improving this area for SAP was one of the “customer commitments” that we heard at the keynote presentation at SuccessConnect in 2016.  Now it is time to deliver. Thank you. One really important and nice improvement that will come to all administrators in the next few weeks is a new tool called ”Cloud Availability Center”.

The Cloud Availability Center is a new, personalized dashboard that provides important information including status/availability, uptime, and maintenance windows for the SAP SuccessFactors HCM Suite, in a new more user user friendly design (almost Fiori design principles!). You only see your own production ready products and data centers. The status of your products and data centers are based on your local time zone, meaning all statuses, notification dates and times impacting your product(s) will be re-calculated for your time zone. Nice!

In the initial implementation, the Cloud Availability Center will be split in five separate modules.

1. Service Status: The status indicator provides information about the overall status of your SAP products.

2. Current Cloud Solution Status: displays the availability of your product at the data center and data pool/ app pool level, and the tenants (installations) they reside on.

3. Event Calendar: provides you with you with a daily, weekly, or monthly view of incidents and maintenance events. You can use the calendar to view historic events or upcoming scheduled planned maintenance and release events.

4. Latest News: Be informed with the latest notification highlights on incidents, maintenance, release, and notices for your products

5. Notification History: find recent and past notices, quickly and easily – without going to your email. This also includes Historical outages, system incidents and system availability & response time reports.
In short it allows you tp get an at-a-glance view into the status of your products, with critical information all in one place. Also to keep up with the most up-to-date status of your products, without searching multiple screens, web pages, or scanning for notices in email.

The Cloud Availability Center will be introduced as new tile in the SAP Support Portal from early February and will thus also be available for System Administrators with Single Sign On from the Admin Center inside SuccessFactors. It will replace a number of existing support pages such as Availability and Reponse Time Reports (ART), Cloud Status Dashboard and others.

The Cloud Availability Center will be right at your fingertips and is linked to general system outage reports, your own incidents and planned maintenance. I think that this will prove to be a great improvement both in terms of functionality, transparency and usability. I am very much looking forward to seeing this in action and hearing what people think.

You can read more about the Cloud Availability Center on this page (requires S-user login) https://support.sap.com/content/sap-root/kb-incidents/cloud-status-dashboard/cac-beta.html

Only downside is that we have to memorize a new 3 letter abbreviation: CAC; but that I can live with.

Best Regards

Erik Ebert, GP Strategies