Technology Blogs by SAP
Learn how to extend and personalize SAP applications. Follow the SAP technology blog for insights into SAP BTP, ABAP, SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP HANA, and more.
cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
fabianlehmann
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
3,677

Motivation

The Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) discipline is sometimes considered to be only a theoretical documentation effort which generally requires considerable amount of manual work. Although, having transparency over how Business Strategy, Business Processes including the Business Capabilities that enable them, and the required IT environment of Applications, Services and Systems (which deliver these capabilities) are interconnected is appreciated, many companies have neglected EAM capabilities and even introduced budget cuts in this area. Unfortuntately, the negative impact of inefficient and ineffective EAM capabilities on planned and ongoing transformation projects is not visible before the beginning of the project’s lifecycle. Outdated, incorrect and missing views of the EA model lead to additional effort to create the missing views before specific implementation projects in the transformation can be started. This extra effort not only slows down the overall transformation, but also requires highly skilled domain experts, longer time and more budget. [2]

How can you not only ensure the accurate representation of EA models, but also accelerate their creation?

“Landscape Discovery” is an option that helps EAM tools by capturing Baseline Application Architecture information and parts of the deployment view at the same time. This not only speeds up the documentation of the baseline, but it also ensures high-quality up-to-date views. This way an EAM tool can become the single source of truth for the collaboration of the different EAM stakeholders, from Business to IT.

[2] Kaisler, Stephan et al (2017): “15 Years of Enterprise Architecting at HICSS: Revisiting the Critical Problems.”. Proceedings of the 50th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/items/4e456313-903e-4ef4-ac73-82ca855b85ac

SAP LeanIX EAM is an example of an Enterprise Architecture Management tool. It provides a 360° overview of all your applications, business capabilities, and IT components so you can gain control of your expanding IT landscape and create roadmaps for major transformation initiatives.

SAP LeanIX also allows you to integrate with SAP Signavio to get information about your business processes.

2024-06-19_16-13-42-2.png

https://docs-eam.leanix.net/?

Enterprise Architects need to navigate specific challenges when modelling SAP cloud solutions due to the complexity and depth of their landscape. In today's world, landscapes are heterogeneous, hybrid, and quite frankly, huge, as they include a multitude of modules, components and dependencies. Enterprise Architects are tasked with not only modeling the current state, but also the to-be architecture in an accurate and efficient way to support a smooth cloud transformation journey. You can find best practices for modeling SAP cloud solutions such as SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP Ariba, SAP SuccessFactors, as well as SAP BTP here

In this blog post, you'll learn about SAP Landscape Discovery, how to navigate the Discovery Inbox and how to create Fact Sheets. And in order to take advantage of all these great features in SAP LeanIX, we'll explain how to connect it to your SAP Cloud ALM tenant.

SAP Landscape Discovery

With the release of SAP Landscape Discovery you can view all your SAP services and systems to identify your baseline architecture.

We're planning to release the SAP BTP service discovery that will allow to discover SAP BTP services in use and  link them to IT Component fact sheets. For more information on the road map, see:

Thanks to SAP Landscape Discovery having an overview of the baseline architecture of your SAP landscape is no longer a challenge.

With the general availability of SAP Landscape Discovery, you’ll have automated visibility into your SAP (BTP) landscape. Concrete features include:

  • Comprehensive overview of all SAP systems with out-of-box integration through SAP Cloud ALM – for cloud products today, and for on-premise and SAP BTP later this year
  • Reduced time and effort to collect and maintain SAP landscape information by creating and linking fact sheets
  • Faster time to value by providing automatic and continuous insights for strategic decision making
  • Easy identification of opportunities to save costs, promote data accuracy and completeness

SAP landscape discovery aims to reduce manual work, eliminate blind spots, and improve data quality about your SAP systems in use today. This will accelerate the discovery and exploration phases for transformations and enable a smoother, more automated way to update the landscape as it changes.

How to connect SAP Cloud ALM with SAP LeanIX's SAP Landscape Discovery

As a prerequisite, you need to have an SAP Cloud ALM tenant which is connected to your SAP BTP global account. To connect SAP Cloud ALM with SAP LeanIX, you can simply follow these steps:

1. Identify the SAP BTP subaccount where you have subscribed to SAP Cloud ALM and ensure that you have an SAP Cloud ALM application and SAP CALM API instance activated:

2024-06-19_13-30-15.png
Hint: You can find app and service instances in the Instances and Subscriptions menu of the SAP BTP cockpit. 

2. From the API instance, you need to create a new service key or use an existing one and copy the JSON:

service_key_calm.pngHint: For help with creating a service key, see here.

After completing these 2 simple steps, you’re ready to integrate with SAP LeanIX

1. In SAP LeanIX choose the Administration entry:

2024-06-19_16-41-46.png


2. On the next screen, from the Discovery & Integrations section, choose Integrations. And then Add Integrations:

add_integration.png

3. Search for SAP and you'll find SAP Landscape Discovery. To connect SAP Cloud ALM with SAP LeanIX, select Configure. 

Configure SAP Landscape Discovery.png

4. On the Configuration screen, you can provide the information (JSON) from the service key: 

2024-06-19_16-54-27.png

5. Once you’ve added the details, save your changes. As a result, the Credential status should be green. After a few minutes, the Data sync between SAP Cloud ALM and SAP LeanIX should also be green: 

2024-06-19_16-57-17.png

More information about SAP Landscape Discovery is available in the official documentation.

Discovery Inbox

After enabling the technical connection between SAP Cloud ALM and SAP LeanIX, we can validate the results of our first "Discovery”

Go to the Discovery Inbox by pressing the View discoveries button. If no errors are displayed, you should be able to identify all discovery items: 

dicover_inbox.png

 

Under List of discoveries, you'll see the results from the SAP Landscape Discovery feature, and details such as:

  • Classification
  • Status
  • Fact Sheet link
  • Integration
  • Discovery date

By selecting one of the items, a detailed view on the discovered details will be visible as well as the preview of fact sheets: 

discover_spa_new.png

 

 

From here, you can link your discovery to fact sheets and catalogs. You'll notice that the status changes from Action needed to Linked

 spa_linked_new2.png

 

Fact Sheets

Fact sheets are how you can document your organization's IT landscape and architectural elements in SAP LeanIX. There are different fact sheets for each architectural object, like applications or IT Components. Fact sheets are the foundation of the meta model. The Meta model is like a blueprint that defines the relationships between different architectural elements and how the information in fact sheets is interconnected. More information here.

Let's create an IT Component fact sheet for SAP Build Process Automation. To do so, choose New Fact Sheet from the ACTIONS menu:

create fact sheet.png

 

Complete the fields as seen below and choose Create:

new fact sheet.png

Once the fact sheet is created you can start completing the required details. For example, you can add the lifecycle, related initiatives and of course connect the it to other architectural elements, like for example Platform (in our case, it's an SAP BTP subaccount).

See an example below: 

sbpa_fact_sheet.png

 

Wrap Up

We hope to have shared enough information in this blog post to get you started with SAP LeanIX for your enterprise architecture requirements. Throughout 2024, the team will continuously release innovations that will make it easier for you to accurately model your entire IT landscape. Check out the road map for more information.

This blog post is co-authored by CeciJens and Stefan 

1 Comment