Is your SAP Landscape in Sync?

“We just deployed enhancement packs and kernel updates 6 months ago, I know all systems are in sync”. We’ve all heard this before. It’s the typical statement given when everyone is pointing fingers at each other after a change that tested successfully in the quality assurance system but brings down a production system.

After the bickering and steamed conversations, someone will eventually be tasked to go back and manually look through all of the component levels of every system to verify nothing has changed. This is a brutally painful and manual process. Looking at every ABAP component, database parameter, profile parameter, kernel level, takes time and is prone to human error - a mix which will likely lead to failure.

If a variance between systems is found, next comes the even more difficult task of finding out who made the change, what was it set to before and when did it change. Ugh - commence pounding head against the wall.

Can you safely say that all of your systems in any landscape are running exactly on the same version or patch levels; from development all the way through production? Are the SAP kernel levels the same? What about all of those ABAP and Java components?

Production systems changes do not start in production

As we all know, changes in a live production system that is being used by the organization are NOT something that starts on the production system itself. Ideas, concepts, and requests for modifications to the production system begin way back on the development system. Once the system is developed and tested and confirmed ready, it is moved into a totally different system. The QA system, which is meant to mimic how it would run in the live production system, is used for further testing and quality assurance. If it makes it through quality control, it will finally be moved into the production system for business use.

This is just the simplest of examples.

In many systems, you’ll find secondary quality systems, pre-production systems, sandboxes, and a host of other systems that any new features and changes must pass through before reaching the business use production system.

This is where it gets scary. Can you confidently say that all of these systems are running on the same components? Do you know if the production system behaves in the same way if it is running different versions than any of the non-production system? The honest answer is that you have no clue.

Not having a clue is NOT how you put changes into a system that is the backbone of your organization.

 ‘Things are not working, we’re not sure why’

One of the most common issues resulting in long hours of troubleshooting is the simple yet hard to manage changes, fixes, and new features do not work the same way on different combinations of versions. If you could maintain consistency across all your systems and environments these issues would be prevented and our poor guy from the beginning of our story, last left banging his head to the wall, will have way better life.

So can I ensure synchronization of all SAP system components?

You bet! Syslink Xandria is continuously monitoring these components. Forget all the time, effort and human error that goes into manually checking all of these components. A click of a button will generate a report that compares all the different components in the all the environments of a system.

As you can see in this screenshot, the dev and production patch levels are different and completely missing in the LAB system. 

With Xandria, this information is up to date and available both in your reports and dashboards.

If there is an inconsistency, you can easily use Xandria’s change tracking to see when it was changed and what the prior version was.

No more headaches, finger pointing or banging your head against the wall. See here how Syslink Xandria can make your SAP life that much easier!