Has anyone implemented SAP license management in SAM Pro?

[Mike Whalley]

I'm keen to start a discussion with folks that have successfully implemented the SAP publisher pack in ServiceNow SAM. I've attempted to implement this feature 3 times, with mixed results, but I'm not really a SAP licensing expert and this is possibly one reason why I've been struggling. Bottom line is that it would be great to get some feedback from the Community, specifically with reference to lessons learned and best practices.

Cheers,  Mike.

[Scott Baker4]

Hi Mike, AGCO is about to launch into a SAP implementation with SAM Pro.  I am curious to know what server OS your SAP is running on.  Much of ours is AIX and we have discovered that this alone may be an issue.  

We are contacting our internal SAP licensing expert to get a better understanding of the licensing.  Another worry is that some of the SAP servers are in the cloud and we did not purchase Cloud Insights to be able to poll those servers, so now we are questioning the accuracy of our SAP licensing data, should we get it all working.   

We are also working on an issue where Discovery is not being able to pull all the necessary information from our AIX servers due to the possibility that their AIX directory structures may differ from any ServiceNow AIX baseline discovery model.   This is scary as it may mean either manually adding the necessary data into the CMDB for over 100 servers or cancelling the entire SAP effort.

I will do my best to continue with updates.

Scott 

[Mike Whalley]

Hi Scott,

The vast majority of the SAP usage/consumption data (Engines, Named User) is ingested from the ABAP program which requires installing in the customer's SAP environment, so it doesn't really matter in what environment your SAP clients are running - you'll get all the Engines and Named User usage from the ABAP program. You'll only need Discovery to collect all of your SAP inventory which is licensed by installations (e.g. Business Objects, Work Manager). Note that you don't need Cloud Insights to inventory servers in the public cloud - you'll need to configure a MID server to collect this information using Discovery.

My recommendation is to get the ABAP program installed and get this usage data flowing into SAM Pro. 90% of SAP licensing use cases are based on this data. Note that your 'internal SAP licensing expert' is vital in this journey because he/she will need to tell you exactly what SAP entitlements your organization has and this is a big job in itself!

Cheers,  Mike.

[dnnsrnhrdt]

I agree with @Mike Whalley, we have the most challenges during implementation in some projects. Unfortunately, the documentation provided by ServiceNow is not clear and there are questions about the correct setup of the RFC connections. 

With reference to this ServiceNOW SAP KB article, how did you understand the configuration of RFC users on each SAP satellite system in your projects? For our customers the scope of the authorizations is not clear and the query of the data leads to errors. Does your RFC users on the individual satellite systems have the same scope of roles/rights as the service account on the SOLMAN systems? (PDF page 5/6)

https://support.servicenow.com/$viewer.do?sysparm_stack=no&sysparm_sys_id=c393f2eddb28d5d00d48db85ca...

Thanks and Best, Dennis

[Martijn Braamsk]

Hi Mike,

we started the implementation in December and are still busy. Some features work fine, some don't (or not yet).

Pretty much all systems (ECC on premise) are connected, and user / engine data is being pulled. However, we are struggling with some functionality like the lack of User Transactions needed to optimize Named User licenses. Hopefully we can finalize this month.....

regards,

Martijn