Incident Exchange Service between HP OpenView Service Desk 4.5 and SAP Solution Manager 4.

0 Service Desk
Data sheet

The HP OpenView Service Desk/SAP Solution Manager Incident Exchange Service seamlessly automates, simplifies and integrates the incident process workflow between HP OpenView and SAP service desks. This service is based on HP ITSM Best Practices for Service Desk and Application Management Best Practices for SAP Applications. By providing a common monitoring environment for your entire organization, the Incident Exchange Service helps increase the productivity and efficiency of your service desk.

Figure 1. True end-to-end management requires both horizontal and vertical integration. Actual business process execution

Business processes Other applications

Rootcause analysis Vertical integration Business impact analysis

SAP business applications

Infrastructure
Consolidated management across multiple platforms, applications Horizontal integration

Executive summary
SAP provides true business-critical applications. For many businesses, a disruption in the SAP environment would impact their core business processes, and thus result in a direct loss of revenue and profit, as well as potentially impacting the real customer. It would also result in degraded customer and supplier business relationships. In an SAP landscape, business process disruptions may be caused by an application or an infrastructure that needs to be tracked and resolved as quickly as possible. The SAP Service Desk is an integral part of SAP Solution Manager 4.0. Its an internal help desk for any SAP installation. Project team members can create messages, which can be managed centrally in the Solution Manager Service Desk, in all project phases, e.g. in the blueprint and during the test phase. Internal customers, including end users and key users, can also create support messages from any SAP system. These messages are processed centrally in the Solution Manager Service Desk. Support messages logged at Solution Manager Service Desk could be related either to an SAP application, an ABAP application or even non-SAP application or infrastructure. If the support message is related to an SAP application, a solution can be found at the SAP marketplace or even from SAP Global Active Support or by the in-house SAP Support team. But if the issue is nonSAP application or infrastructure-related, it needs to be resolved by an infrastructure administrator or by administrators of the non-SAP application. The requirement is to forward the message to an administrator who uses a third-party service desk.

HP OpenView Service Desk gives enterprise and service providers a unique solution to successfully manage service levels. The integrated service desk functionality allows managing crucial support and service processes to successfully deal with todays complex IT management challenges. HP OpenView Service Desk helps to manage your service level agreements (SLAs) by showing you which IT elements your service is depending on, which customers are receiving the service, and who is managing and supporting the service.

Business needs
Management of this business-critical, yet increasingly complex, SAP environment must be end to end. Monitoring the availability and performance of SAP applications themselves (e.g. R/3 Basis, the Web Application Server, the Enterprise Portal, CRM, SCM, etc.) is only one part of the solution. Non-SAP applications that are part of a given business process must also be monitored. In addition, all of these applications sit on top of a complex set of hardware and software infrastructure, including the network (routers, switches, firewalls), servers (hardware and operating system), and other software infrastructure (DNS, LDAP, etc.). The tools and services provided by SAP for managing the SAP-specific environment, including Solution Manager and CCMS, have to be complemented with HP OpenView to address this.

Given how critical SAP is for many businesses and the need for IT to deliver specified service levels, a management solution for SAP environments must also provide for monitoring the actual user experience. It must allow for establishing and measuring performance against contractual SLAs. Its also no longer about just intra-company services. SAP business processes can extend to suppliers, partners and customers. Service outages wont impact just your company; they may also affect your relationship with suppliers, partners and customers. Hence the challenge would be to address these three areas: SAP applications Non-SAP applications Hardware and software infrastructure SAP applications can be managed to a large extent by using Solution Manager, which would be present in such a landscape. The other two areas of non-SAP applications and infrastructure need to be managed by using an External Service Desk, hence the need for an incident exchange. In the absence of such an incident exchange, we would get into a situation with incidents arising and recorded at two service desks, and incidents could be lost. Under such circumstances, an organization would be unable to provide a solution in a timely manner.

The problem here is how to track the incidents/support messages in a landscape. Therefore tight coordination is required between SAP Solution Manager and the external service desk to track the status, ownership, solution, report, etc. for an incident/support message. Now, with new levels of integration with SAP Solution Manager Service Desk, your organization can manage your SAP service faster and better than ever before.

Solution description
The Incident Exchange Service exchanges incidents between HP OpenView Service Desk 4.5 and SAP Solution Manager 4.0 Service Desk. In an enterprise, if SAP Solution Manager 4.0 Service Desk is used along with HP OpenView Service Desk 4.5, and other HP OpenView monitoring tools are used, it becomes easy to integrate all the monitoring tools to have a common monitoring environment for the entire organization. The current solution integration software is being built by the HP OpenView development team based upon standard product functionality. Based on the success of the service, which will allow us to fine-tune the enabling technology and product capabilities in real-life environments, we will make a business-driven decision to productize the value as part of our IT Service Management (ITSM) roadmap.

Figure 2. HP-recommended implementation scenario. In this scenario, a centralized service desk for the enterprise is used to monitor service requests and incidents.

OVSD Client 1

OVSD Client 2

IE/Netscape browser for service pages HTTP

TCP/IP

TCP/IP

Solution Manager Service Desk

Support message may be solved SAP Marketwith place for notes SAP Notes

SAP interface

HP OVSD interface

HP OpenView Service Desk

Web server

Support message may be solved with SAP GAS SAP Support for solution Incident is resolved at OVSD following Incident Management Process

Oracle database

Web service-based incident exchange between SAP Solution Manager 4.0 and HP OpenView Service Desk 4.5
HP, in conjunction with SAP, has designed and developed an interface to exchange support messages from SAP Solution Manager Service Desk to HP OpenView Service Desk 4.5. The interface is a web service that can bi-directionally exchange incidents between both service desks in a near real-time, push-based fashion. This interface enables a couple of implementation scenarios. HP-recommended implementation scenario One such scenario that HP recommends is to have HP OpenView Service Desk 4.5 as a central and consolidated master service desk for SAP-related, non-SAP-related and infrastructure incidents in an enterprise. An end user can log incidents into service desk using any of the interfaces. Incidents are associated to a CI that could be an item in the infrastructure or an SAP application. If the incident is related to an SAP application, it is forwarded to SAP Solution Manager Service Desk for further processing. At Solution Manager Service Desk, the support message is processed and a solution is proposed before it is sent back to HP OpenView Service Desk. The proposed solution is verified with the end user. If the end user is satisfied with the solution, then the incident is closed in HP OpenView Service Desk, which in turn closes the support message in SAP Solution Manager Service Desk. Incidents are exchanged with a flexible, powerful and customizable field and value mapping mechanism provided by the incident exchange web service.

Key benefits and features

Automatic forwarding of incidents along with their attributes, such as priority, attachments, etc., from HP OpenView Service Desk 4.5 to SAP Solution Manager Service Desk 4.0 HP Application Management Best practices for SAP and HP ITSM Best Practices for Service Desk followed in Incident Exchange at HP OpenView Service Desk 4.5 HP OpenView tools combined with HP OpenView Service Desk 4.5 to exchange incidents with SAP Solution Manager 4.0 Service Desk Incident Exchange interface based on web services (simple, flexible, platform-independent)

Incident Exchange Value proposition

The HP OpenView Service Desk4.5/SAP Solution Manager Incident Exchange seamlessly automates, simplifies and integrates the incident process workflow between HP OpenView and SAP service desk, resulting in: Maximized productivity and efficiency of your service desk or desks by speeding up incident resolution times Optimized intra-IT, IT to customer, and IT to application owner communication. Incidents are seamlessly exchanged in near real time between both systems (bi-directionally) and kept up to date, so both service desk teams have a smooth handover and a common view. Service desk response to events and problems is improved, resulting in higher levels of service to end users and an optimized user experience.

 Service management is optimized through integration and automation-integration into formal configuration, problem, change management and service level management, etc. Consistent reporting is enabled. Applying the HP ITSM Reference Model and Service Desk Best Practices, customers can benefit from HPs expertise in how to organize ITSM processes (incident management, in this case) across SAP and non-SAP teams.

HP SAP ITS&AM initiative

HP and SAP also co-partner on the HP SAP ITS&AM (IT Service and Application Management) initiative to provide a unique solution designed for more effective and more efficient management of heterogeneous IT environments. The HP SAP ITS&AM solution provides enterprises with in-depth, end-to-end information about their IT landscapes. This solution fosters seamless and proactive communication and alignment between people, technologies and processes, and it delivers premier management capabilities for the companys entire IT landscapespanning infrastructures, applications and services. The HP SAP ITS&AM solution consists of a set of services, software/hardware products and standard methodologies. This combined solution delivers functionalities that: Improve the quality of information Enhance communication Empower management Based on improved information, communication and management capabilities, the entire IT system landscape can be optimized more effectively and efficiently. IT organizations are enabled to identify and utilize the optimization potential within their existing SAP landscapes and related non-SAP applications. This combined effort has developed the Incident Exchange Service for exchanging incidents and support messages.

HP ITSM Reference Model 3.0 Best Practice for HP OpenView Service Desk 4.5
The HP IT Service Management Best Practices for HP OpenView Service Desk 4.5 solution enables IT organizations to use a directed design approach by providing a predefined and preconfigured foundation for an HP OpenView Service Desk implementation. The Service Desk Best Practice includes the HP IT Service Management Reference Model with five predefined service management processes with detailed procedures, and work instructions listed below: Incident and service request management Problem management Configuration management (including personnel and organization) Change management Service level management Incident Exchange Service incorporates HP ITSM Reference Model 3.0 Best Practices for HP OpenView Service Desk 4.5, and in that only for the Incident and Service Request Management process.

Incident Exchange Service offering

The service is offered to customers who will implement the released SAP Solution Manager 4.0 version and also have HP OpenView Service Desk 4.5 in production. In this service offering the customer is provided with the following: 3-day workshop 10-20 days of proof of concept (pre-pilot) Scaled implementation (based upon pre-pilot learnings and definitions) Prerequisites for the proof of concept bundle are as follows: SAP Solution Manager 3.2 Service Desk in production Installed SAP Solution Manager 4.0 and HP OpenView 4.5 Service Desk incident exchange functionality The customer is provided with the following from HP and SAP: HP offering HP Consultant (HP OpenView Service Desk expert) Incident exchange best practices Incident exchange evaluation software SAP/Customer or HP additional offering SAP consultant (Solution Manager 4.0 Service Desk expert) SAP offering Released Solution Manager 4.0 and Solution Manager 4.0 Service Desk interface

For more information

Please contact your HP local representative directly, or visit www.hp.com/managementsoftware/sap.

Copyright 2006 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. The only warranties for HP products and services are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. HP shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.

For more information visit www.hp.com/managementsoftware/sap

4AA0-4387ENW, February 2006