SAP Solution Manager is a central support and system management suite provided to SAP's customers as part of their license agreement. As an SAP system landscape may include a large number of installed SAP and non-SAP systems, SAP Solution Manager is intended to reduce and centralize the management of these systems as well as end-to-end business processes. SAP Solution Manager covers the complete application lifecycle of an SAP customer's business processes running on premise, hybrid or in the cloud. The modern and intelligent IT management platform empowers IT organizations for the future of business. With this highly integrated application lifecycle management framework, SAP customers can implement, maintain, run, and adopt all enterprise software and processes – even if they run on non-SAP software – while supporting business innovation, business continuity, and efficient operations. In an SAP customer's landscape, SAP Solution Manager is the managing system, and the business suite applications are the managed systems. Non-SAP systems in the landscape can also be covered as part of end-to-end business process lifecycle management. The managed customer landscape can consist of on-premise, cloud, or a combination of both. Business processes and changes can also be documented during major releases, minor releases and bugfixes, making the platform an important business platform as well as an IT platform to provide a "single source of the truth" reference model for the customer. The current release of SAP Solution Manager is 7.2, which provides features for both IT and business users for enhancing, automating and improving the management of SAP and non-SAP systems:
The current version of SAP Solution Manager is SAP Solution Manager 7.2, available since August 2016. Support Package Stack 10 for SAP Solution Manager 7.2 was released in December 2019, delivering new innovations based on customer innovation requests. Accordingly, the product’s documentation was updated with new release information. SAP Solution Manager 7.2 has been verified as ITIL compliant in 15 core processes by Pink Elephant.
Some of the claimed benefits of using SAP Solution Manager 7.2 are that it helps:
Support the orchestration of the entire end-to-end customer business scenarios, processes and steps via business process modeling, change control, IT service management and a robust monitoring and alerting infrastructure
Is the value companion for implementing and operation all of SAP's next generation products, such as SAP S/4HANA
Provides simple, web-based user interfaces and management dashboards, and embedded graphical modeling capability
Increases efficiency with both Application and Business Process Operations for central control of critical operations support tasks
Support the business with business process modeling, automated business blueprint generation, and business process usage analysis and analytics
Reduces risk from changes to the environment with risk-based testing applications such as the Business Process Change Analyzer and Scope and Effort Analyzer
Steamlines and reduces the custom code footprint of the customer's SAP systems through Custom Code Management
Provide customers with generous usage rights for support of non-SAP components and without the need for named system users, included in the customer's SAP Enterprise Support contract
Includes the powerful Focused Build requirements-to-deploy process, and Focused Insights analytical dashboards at no additional charge as of January 1, 2020
SAP Solution Manager 7.2 also features improved support for hybrid landscapes, as well as new user interfaces based on SAP Fiori. 7.2 can also run on the SAP HANA database as an option. The SAP Solution Manager Product Roadmap presentation has been updated with more details.
