Business Service Management

Business Service Management allows users to understand and manage information related to business services. On the one hand, it consumes cloud service status events (like disruption, degradation, maintenance, communication), which are communicated by SAP in SAP for Me and maps it to the corresponding business services. On the other hand, it will be able to consume events from the other monitoring use cases in SAP Cloud ALM for Operations via the Intelligent Event Processing. This allows you to see which business functionality is (or was) affected by a downtime event of a cloud service. 

The following graphic illustrate the relationship between the involved components:

Business Service Management has an embedded service level management functionality, where you can define service level objectives for the business services. From the consumed information, Business Service Management can automatically and continuously document the achieved service levels for the business services. Furthermore, Business Service Management includes an Event Calendar, which gives an overview on the events that occurred for the respective business services. This Event Calendar allows the maintenance and execution of customer initiated status events. Business Service Management also forwards the information towards the other monitoring use cases of SAP Cloud ALM for Operations.

A business service abstracts the technical names of services or systems to a name, which can be understood by business users.

The graphic below provides a definition of a Business Service:

Each business service has a name and additional description. It contains a relationship to multiple services or systems. Each business service has a name, a description, and it can consist of one or multiple services or systems. The grouping of these services and systems into a business service is flexible and can be done according to the specific needs and use cases of the organization. Examples of business services mentioned, include the business processes Lead to Cash or Hire to Retire, and various systems related to marketing, training, and development.

The most important event data source for Business Service Management is the Cloud Availability in SAP for Me,

The following screenshots show SAP for Me and the SAP Cloud ALM Inbound Event Provider:

This service informs customers about upcoming maintenance windows or detected disruptions or degradations for their SAP SAAS, PAAS or Private Cloud services via Cloud Service Notifications. It sends out cloud service notifications that are automatically pushed to SAP Cloud ALM. The supported service types can be found in this list on the SAP Cloud ALM for Operations Expert Portal. If the corresponding service is included in a business service in Business Service Management, then the events are shown in the Event Calendar and in Service Level Reporting.

Business Service Management has several additional possibilities to send and receive the data.

Watch this video to gain a better understanding of the inbound and outbound channels in Business Service Management:

The monitoring apps in SAP Cloud ALM for Operations can show the current status of monitored services and systems as Business Service Management broadcasts ongoing as status events on service or system level to the other monitoring applications. Usually, this information is shown by a small calendar icon in the overview of the other monitoring apps, for example in Health Monitoring. Here, also further details for the respective business service can be shown by the user.

The screenshot below displays the status of a Business Service Management event for a SAP S/4 HANA Cloud service:

In general, the following sources for status events exist:

• SAP: SAP informs about maintenances, disruptions and degradations and communicates news for SAP-managed cloud services via Cloud Service Availability Notification events. These events are automatically sent to SAP Cloud ALM and shown in the Event Calendar with "Source: SAP".
• Custom: You can create and edit your own events in the Event Calendar. These events are shown with "Source: Custom".

The following screenshot displays SAP as the source for a Status Event:

The following additional status event sources are planned (feature not yet available):

• Monitoring: Monitoring applications like Health Monitoring or Synthetic User Monitoring will be enabled to calculate disruptions or degradations and create these events in the event calendar.
• API: An inbound API (Application Programming Interface) in the OpenTelemetry log format will allow the creation of events from an external tool. For example, an external IT Service Management tool can then send planned maintenances to the event calendar.

Status events indicate the status of a business service, service or system:

• Maintenance: Service is not available during a defined time interval due to planned and previously announced maintenance activities.
• Disruption: Service is not available due to unplanned disruptive events.
• Degradation: Service usage is limited, for example, due to performance problems.

Other Events: Like Communication which inform about news or planned changes.

The Service Level Relevant flag decides whether a status event reduces the Achieved Service Level:

• Maintenance Events are by default not Service Level Relevant.
• Degradation Events are by default not Service Level Relevant.
• Disruption Events are by default Service Level Relevant.

This screenshot shows the Service Level Relevance for an Status Event:

For custom events, you can override the default setting when creating the event.

The event lifecycle for maintenance involves several phases. The difference is that a maintenance event is scheduled, whereas disruption and degradation events are not scheduled as shown in the following diagram:

A maintenance is therefore starting with the announcement phase, followed by a reminder leading up to the start of the maintenance. Once the maintenance starts, there are status updates provided until the completion of the maintenance. On the other hand, disruption or degradation events have a different lifecycle. They involve phases such as detection, status update, and resolution, which can take days or weeks to complete. These events are typically reported by SAP.

A pure communication event just consists of an announcement without further consequences.

Status events can be created for services, systems and business services. The propagation rules in Business Service Management are as follows:

• Status events on cloud services or systems are propagated to the corresponding business services.
• Status events on business services are not propagated to the corresponding cloud services or systems.

The following figure shows the propagation of a system to a Business Service:

The Overview page displays the current overall status of each business service:

The overall status is inherited from the services/systems, which are assigned to the business service.

Additionally, the following information is displayed:

• The date and time of the next planned maintenance.
• The current duration of a disruption or degradation.
• The remaining time for an ongoing maintenance.
• The current service level quality.
• Detail information about the business service and its current event.

When you select an event in the calendar, you can see the event details:

• Event name, type, start/end time, duration, description.
• The action log with all changes that have been performed on the event (for example detection, update, resolution).
• Detailed information about the affected services or systems.

The following screenshots display the Event Details, which include Event Information and the Action Log. Additionally, on the right side, there is a guide on how to manually create Events.:

It is also possible to create events manually, for example, if you want to define a maintenance for a system.

The Event Calendar displays all status events which were detected/created for a business service:

There are two views for the Event Calendar:

• The global event calendar shows all events for all business services in scope.
• By selecting the business service name in the global event calendar, you can display the business service specific event calendar. Here you can see the events for the selected business service and for all contained services and systems.

The following demonstration video illustrates how the Business Service Management application assists in checking the current status of a Business Service, the Service Level for the current month, and the date and duration of upcoming maintenance events using the event calendar:

You can follow along with this demonstration either by using the SAP Cloud ALM Public Demo tenant or your own SAP Cloud ALM tenant, if this use case has already been set up. To do this, simply select the group Operations and then choose the Business Service Management tile.

On the Service Level Reporting page, you can see the calculated service level quality of each business service, which results out of the detected disruptions of the service. You can choose between monthly, quarterly or yearly view.

These screenshots display various views and include a PDF download option:

For each business service you can also display a service level detail report. Here you can find information on all the events which were used to calculate the service level quality of the selected time frame. You can also see the total disruption, degradation and maintenance times of the contained services and systems. You can download the service level report in PDF format.

Setup steps to define Service Level Objectives:

1. Define a Default Service Level Objective (one-time activity).
2. Define Business Services.
3. Define Event Actions (optional).

The following screenshot display the configurations for a Service Level Objective:

The default or "Global" Service Level Objective will be applied by default to all new business services.

You can configure the following parameters to influence the service level report:

• The service level objective.
• The time zone in which the service level is calculated.
• The business hours: Here you can configure either 24/7 operation or you can specify working days and times where the services and systems should be available.

The following steps describe the setup to create a new Business Service via the configuration tray in Business Service Management:

1. Enter Basic Information: Enter name and description of the new Business Service.
2. Add Services/Systems: Add cloud services or systems to the business service.
3. Define Service Level Objectives: Either reuse the default Service Level Objective for the new business service or define a specific Service Level Objective.
4. Define Event Actions: Define who should receive mail notifications and when for new status events and updates and/or define whether tickets in an external IT Service Management system shall be created for status events.

The following screenshots demonstrate how to create a new Business Service: