Why do we need a Solution Manager instance? What does it do?

Once you get your OSS link to SAP up and running, SAP support can be used via transaction OSS1 until April 2006. At that point, all SAP support activates must be done either via the SAP Marketplace or via new functionality of your Solution Manager instance.

Think of a Solution Manager as the hub of your SAP landscape. It contains information about your SAP instances – called satellite systems. This information includes the instance patch levels, clients, add-ons, etc. It does this via Remote Function Calls (RFC) we talked about earlier from the Solution Manager instance to the satellite instances. And SolMan gathers this information on a scheduled basis to keep it fresh.

As of April when SAP needs to get into one of your instances, you will open a connection for them in the SolMan instance, and they will use SolMan to connect to the instance with the problem. Instead of having to write down all the pertinent information about the instance having problems, all the information SAP needs like patch level, kernel version, etc. will be easily displayed by SAP by the SolMan instance. Your OSS connection will be added and configured via SolMan.

Opening a service connection will use a different procedure than the previous method as well. First, the LOP program needs to be run on the box hosting saprouter, and a Service Connector Setup Program needs to be run on a workstation holding a SAPGui so that OSS1 can sorta still work the way it used to, and a whole lot of other things we haven’t done yet and have to research in order to explain it to you. Just keep in mind, the whole process is going through a major change and when we understand, we will pass the knowledge on.

Solution Manager does a whole slew of other functions as well including customer service and help desk tasks. Since you have to have it by April 2006, you may as well include it as part of your SAP landscape now.

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