Use ServiceNow to automate Incident Management for SAP

[Enevoldsen]

Mondays

It's Monday morning, and you just came into the office after a very long Go Live weekend. All the SAP changes were sent into production, and now you are just eager to get the first end user feedback and start to harvest some of the new business values which were introduced by this new e-commerce project.

You log into SAP and decide to run the e-commerce check report to see the order uptake in the different sales org's. But you quickly realize that one of the newly added sales org's in Asia does not have any orders created at all. 

You start to run different check reports and search the SAP system for any root cause which could be related to this. After spending quite some time on investigations, you finally find several dumps which were introduced by some missing authorizations. And as a negative side effect to these dumps, you realize that the inbound order interface is failing; several orders are stuck in the queue with errors. You need to get the authorization and the project team into a meeting, so they can find a solution to the issue and decide how to get the interface up and running again. A couple of hours later the issue has been resolved, and the orders are flowing in as expected.

You end up sitting at your desk with a cold cup of coffee, dreaming about a solution where such incidents were recorded and routed to the right ressources, at the same second they occurred in SAP. So why not integrate your ServiceNow ITSM solution with SAP? And transform those errors into incidents and utilize the benefits of an already existing solution for Incident Management in ServiceNow.

How to integrate

So the first question might be: "How can I integrate ServiceNow with SAP seen from a technical point of view?" Well there are already different options available, depending on your requirements:

• If you want to pull data from SAP:
  • Use ServiceNow ERP Canvas to read data from SAP using an ERP Model. These ERP models will define how to read data from a single table, a join of multiple tables or using a function in SAP. The data will be available as Remote Tables or ETL extracts depending on the data volume.
  • Build a flow in Flowdesigner and use ServiceNow ECC Spoke (Execute RFC) to call a BAPI or a remote enabled function module in SAP. 
• If you want to push data from SAP:
  • Create you own report in SAP to read the relevant data and use ServiceNow Import Set API to POST data into Staging Tables in ServiceNow 

So there are already different options available for you to use; it just depends on your requirements.

Creating the Incident

When you have the data available in ServiceNow (either from a push or pull scenario), next step is to create the incident. If you are working in FlowDesigner there is already an Action available in the ServiceNow Core Spoke which can be used to create the incident record for you. Are you more familiar with Scripting, then you can use GlideRecord to create the incident.

Next question could be: "Do you really want an incident for each unique error you would find in SAP?" Probably not; Lets say that you have e.g. dumps coming from the same custom report, and it's dumping again and again within the same day. Then it might be better to register this unique kind of error as one incident and then just link it to all the related instances of that dump in SAP. The incident record already has a feature to help you with this; you can use the column 'correlation id' to track what a third party system is replicating. So multiple dumps of the same kind will end up in one incident.

The logic could be the following when you create new incidents:

• Check if there is an open incident with a similar 'correlation id' - if yes, then just link the instance of the dump to the existing incident
• If no open incident exist with a similar 'correlation id', then create a new incident with the dump information and add the 'correlation id' to the incident

When you are creating the incident, consider adding your own logic to:

• Determine the assignment group based on the information you get from SAP, and route the incident to the right ressources (SAP Developer, Basis or somebody in a functional team)
• Determine urgency, impact and priority. E.g. for dumps, then the amount of dumps and the related users, might be a good indicator
• Link the incidents to CMDB and SLA
• Link to knowledge articles if its an incident with an already know resolution    

Use Cases

I have 25 years' professional background from the technical side of SAP, so the obvious use cases I can think of, would come from that space e.g.: 

• SAP Dumps 
• Inbound/Outbound interface to SAP (monitoring of SXMB_MONI)
• IDOC's failing with Errors
• Batch Jobs with steps failing

And the functional area could also be interesting to automate.

Spread the word

So now that you have the integration in place, and you have decided how to create the incidents and chosen one or more use cases, then the next step would be to determine how to notify the people in the assignment group.

All the SAP related incidents will of course be visible directly in ServiceNow - in reports and dashboards. But the same incidents could also be seen on mobile devices, with no additional development needed. And if you want to go even further in the communication, then there are already ServiceNow Spokes available for e.g. Teams and Slack, or you could use one of the prebuilt workflows for Automation and for those very critical incidents decide to automatically start a Zoom meeting, invite participants, and notify a workspace (Slack, Microsoft Teams, ServiceNow email).
There are many options.

Enjoy the hot coffee

Please feel free to share your comments and ideas related to interesting use cases or how to automate it in ServiceNow... and enjoy the coffee while it's hot...