SAP Cloud ALM vs SAP Solution Manager

[sonal_chandarana]

As you all know, there is a buzzword around these days about a newly launched product– SAP Cloud ALM. There are also lot of questions around it-

• What exactly is SAP Cloud ALM and how is it different from SAP Solution Manager?


• Is SAP Cloud ALM just a Cloud based SAP Solution Manager?


• Does it involve a license fee?


• Will it replace SAP Solution Manager?


• What is the role of Basis Consultant in SAP Cloud ALM?

And so on...

So, let’s get some clarity on this…

What is SAP Cloud ALM?

SAP Cloud ALM is a SaaS offering by SAP launched on May 29^th, 2020, for Application lifecycle management (ALM), positioned mainly for Cloud based SAP applications. SAP Cloud ALM extends ALM into the cloud and makes it more standardized. It is natively developed on SAP Cloud Platform with Cloud Foundry and Cloud Application Programming Model (CAP) and SAP HANA as a Service.

​It is cost-efficient for customers, ready to use and instantaneously available. Moreover, it has daily updates which means the new features can be pushed daily and no action is required from customers to start using these features. Usage rights for SAP Cloud ALM are included with SAP Enterprise Support, cloud editions, which come as part of your subscription for cloud solutions from SAP. It comes with a fair usage policy.

How is SAP Cloud ALM different from SAP Solution Manager?

Though SAP Solution Manager can be used for Cloud products currently and SAP Cloud ALM too may be used for hybrid scenarios as part of future roadmap, it is important to understand the positioning of these two different products. SAP Solution Manager is recommended for on-premise products and SAP Cloud ALM is engineered keeping the Cloud applications in mind. Both these products have different use cases, and both serve a different market.

As we know, the requirements for monitoring of SAP S/4HANA Cloud will obviously differ from that of on-premise SAP S/4HANA systems. For example, monitoring of system outages, system performance issues, OS/DB level monitoring, etc. for SAP S/4HANA Cloud are taken over by the cloud service provider. Hence cloud customers do not need these system monitoring KPIs, but on-premise customer will certainly need this information for timely action, which is very well provided by SAP Solution Manager.

Also, to begin using SAP Solution Manager productively– there are series of activities required to be performed as pre-requisites. It includes Installation, Basic setup, System Preparation, Infrastructure preparation and finally Managed system configuration. Having done that, you can configure required features for managed systems like System monitoring, EWA reports, BPMON, ChaRM, Job Monitoring, DVM, Integration Monitoring, etc. mostly performed by a Basis Consultant.

Having said that, implementing and operating SAP cloud solutions is still controlled by the customer. To manage these cloud solutions, SAP Cloud customer will certainly prefer SaaS based ALM Solution.

That’s exactly what SAP Cloud ALM is meant for! You just need to request the access when you have Enterprise Support for Cloud solutions. Of course, small activities are required like setting up landscape management which can be taken care by a Basis Consultant. Basically, the effort needed to setup SAP Cloud ALM is minimal. The product and functional coverage will be extended rapidly to make it a full -fledged ALM product for Cloud based solutions. You can make your transition to the cloud quickly and efficiently with the SAP Cloud ALM solution.

ALM for Implementation

SAP Cloud ALM complements with SAP Activate Methodology for SAP Cloud Implementations. It can be used in all the phases- Discover, Explore, Realize and Deploy phases of SAP Activate Methodology. There is an overview dashboard to track overall project status and quickly onboard team members with various roles. It supports Process management, Requirement capturing during Fit-To -Standard workshops, Task Management, Test Management, Deploy Management and many more features are being added as part of future roadmap. Hence it acts as a central tool for the entire Implementation team to better collaborate during various phases of Implementation.

For SAP Solution manager, Focused Build is the corresponding product that helps to manage the entire lifecycle of an Implementation project.

ALM for Operations

SAP Cloud ALM also helps to ‘Run’ the SAP Cloud solution by functionalities like Business Process Monitoring and Integration Monitoring. Once the systems are connected in Landscape Management in SAP Cloud ALM, it takes no time to start using these features. The predefined KPIs for BPMON are auto discovered and filled up with metrics from the backend systems and ready to use for monitoring shortly. Even for Integration Monitoring, defining services/scenarios is all it takes to start using the feature. Anomalies are detected on time either proactively or through robust alert management, diagnosed with powerful root call analysis feature and corrected automatically with embedded workflows.

For SAP Solution Manager, the guided steps will have to be followed in solman_setup transaction to configure the monitoring features by the Basis Consultant.

Conclusion

• SAP Cloud ALM and SAP Solution Manager are two different products for Application Lifecycle Management by SAP, positioned for different customers and do not involve any license fee


• SAP Cloud ALM is not meant to replace SAP Solution Manager. SAP Solution Manager will be continuously enhanced based on customer feedback via customer connection


• The migration of data/templates/monitoring objects is not possible between these two ALM products. Both these products have a totally different architecture.


• It is recommended that on-premise customers use SAP Solution Manager and Cloud customers will benefit more from SAP Cloud ALM

**General Availability for SAP Cloud ALM is scheduled from 31^st August onwards...

Additional Learning

SAP Cloud ALM Support Page

https://support.sap.com/en/alm/sap-cloud-alm.html

Learning Journey -Implementation-

https://help.sap.com/doc/221f8f84afef43d29ad37ef2af0c4adf/HP_2.0/en-US/799b8d0ec54f457788d80741afedf...

Learning Journey- Operations

https://help.sap.com/doc/221f8f84afef43d29ad37ef2af0c4adf/HP_2.0/en-US/8475e46da01a4f84b30e2b6f92fce...

Demos-

https://wpb101101.hana.ondemand.com/wpb/pub/wa/index.html?show=group!GR_267560D84F4CD84#group!GR_77E...

[former_member132185]

HI Sonal,

Great write up. Easy to follow and very informative.

My question is about the Hybrid ERP (2-Tier) scenario:

For customers who have deployed S/4HANA On-Premise and Cloud on a 2-Tier ERP Setup, what would be the ALM recommendation. Solution Manager or Cloud ALM or both?

Regards,

Raghavendra Mani

[sonal_chandarana]

Hi Raghavendra,

Thanks for your interest and question.

SAP Solution Manager is currently full-fledged ALM Solution mainly for on-premise customers, but it can very well be leveraged for hybrid and cloud scenarios.

SAP Cloud ALM can currently be used for Application Lifecycle Management of Cloud solutions, but in coming months, it will be a full-fledged ALM solution for hybrid and on-premise landscapes as part of future roadmap.

Having said that, SAP Solution Manager is recommended for on-premise products and SAP Cloud ALM will benefit cloud customers more. So, depending on the current gravity and future strategy of on-premise and cloud systems in a 2-Tier landscape, a customer will have to choose from these two ALM products.

Hope this helps!!

Regards,

Sonal Chandarana

[former_member696627]

Nice info Sonal

[venkatajagadeeshwarareddy]

Awesome. Its truly motivating and inspiring to know such information about new products from SAP.

Thank you for detailed explanation.

[BasanthSwain]

Hi Sonal

Thanks for the blog, it is very informative.

Prior to release of SAP CALM, customers were using the Implementation Portal to guide through the Project, F2S etc. The question is where does the Implementation Portal fit now?

Thanks

Basanth

[sonal_chandarana]

Hi Basanth,

Thanks for the question. The Implementation portal focusses on Project Management for S/4HANA. whereas SAP Cloud ALM can be used for Implementation of S/4HANA, SuccessFactors, Ariba, etc.  and more in coming days.

Since SAP Cloud ALM is mass ready for S/4HANA with many more features than just project management, this one platform will serve as single ALM solution for cloud products.

Hence, the implementation portal for SAP S/4HANA Cloud is a key component and a subset of SAP Cloud ALM, the solution for the lifecycle management of cloud applications.

Regards,

Sonal

[AndreasT]

Hi, thank you for the overview. Is SAP alert notification service also an option?

[former_member383216]

Hi,

You said  "For example, monitoring of system outages, system performance issues, OS/DB level monitoring, etc. for SAP S/4HANA Cloud are taken over by the cloud service provider"

It means that the customer is running SCP ?

Regards.

 

Stéphane M.

[sonal_chandarana]

Hi Stephane,

Cloud Service Providers can be either SAP or any of the hypersclaers like Azure, Google Cloud , AWS...

Regards,

Sonal

[sonal_chandarana]

Hi Tiller,

I suppose you are asking for Alert Service for SAP Cloud ALM, Definitely there is a feature to create alerts in SAP Cloud ALM also.

Regards,

Sonal

[johannes_demmelhuber]

Hi Sonal,

thanks for the informations. 2 weeks ago we had onboarding with Cloud ALM. So we got one global Account with one subaccount.

Does Cloud ALM also have the concept of stages for development and production? So a subaccount for development and a subaccount for production? Does this possibility exist at all, or is it planned at all?

Regards

Johannes

[wei-shang_ku]

SAP Cloud ALM is not meant to replace SAP Solution Manager --> still a valid statement ?

3255311 - SAP Solution Manager 7.2 mainstream maintenance
...

Reason and Prerequisites

This note describes the maintenance strategy and maintenance phases of SAP Solution Manager 7.2

Solution

To enable planning security and support a sufficient transition phase from SAP Solution Manager 7.2 to SAP Cloud ALM, SAP provides mainstream maintenance for SAP Solution Manager 7.2 until December 31, 2027.

[sonal_chandarana]

Hi Wei-Shang Ku,

Thanks for the question. We say that SAP Cloud ALM will not replace SAP Solution Manager in the context that SAP Cloud ALM is not a successor of SAP Solution Manager , both are different products with different architecture altogether.

Since mainstream maintenance for SAP Solution Manager 7.2 is until December 31, 2027, Customers will have to use SAP Cloud ALM after that . But there will not be any direct comparison between these two products.

More and more features will be available in SAP Cloud ALM .

Regards,

Sonal

[sonal_chandarana]

Hi Johannes,

There are no plans to provide separate tenants for Dev and Production for SAP Cloud ALM

Regards,

Sonal

[KavitaMane]

Hi Sonal,

Are we going to have EWA, SolDoc, CharM, DVM, CCLM functionality in Cloud ALM once Solman Support is ended.

 

Regards

Kavita

[Santa]

Hi Sonal,
thank you for the blog.

Is SAP System Measurement of SAP Private Cloud also an option for SAP Cloud ALM?
https://support.sap.com/en/my-support/systems-installations/system-measurement.html?anchorId=section...
regards
Klaus

[PCarbonel]

HI Sonal,

Great write up. Easy to follow and very informative.

[fvasquez]

Nice day.
It is possible to have an instance of Solman 7.2 in the cloud and collaboratively work with C ALM.
The objective of this application is: With the SAP SOLMAN72 ALM engines, such as: ALM, FOCUSED BUILD – FOCUSE RUN - FOCUSED INSIGTH, integrate and collaborate all the SYSTEMS and the LANDSCAPE that will be on-Premise and non-SAP and in a collaborative scenario [SAP SOLMAN 72 ALM < –- > SAP CLOUD ALM] with the entire PLATFORM AND SOLUTIONS in the CLOUD, are integrated with the ARCHITECTURAL tools and frameworks of the ALM Methodology. If this is possible, does it carry a cost ?

[Mildred]

Thanks for the information! Excellent blog! I have a question... How will incidents and the entire IT Service Management part be managed now?