Cisco Cisco Process Orchestrator 3.0 Information Guide
Outing the Outages
An SAP customer since 1995, CSR has an experienced SAP team
and broad user base. Like most companies, the business is always
looking for ways to increase the value of its IT investments and
reduce its maintenance costs. To that end, in 2007, the company
decided to migrate its SAP data from an Oracle database to a
Microsoft SQL database. During the migration, CSR began to
experience IT stability issues, including some SAP system outages
— the longest outage lasted eight hours and affected a number of
business functions.
“Our SAP ERP system is mission-critical to us,” explains Adam
Bunn, SAP Basis Team Lead at CSR. “It literally opens our cash
register drawers in our retail outlets. And some of our facto-
ries dispatch products 24 hours a day. So if the system is down,
we can’t process the dispatch paperwork and trucks back up at
the docks while we’re forced to manually write out the proper
documentation. Those sorts of issues have a direct impact on our
ability to do business.”
An outage will be extended if the right people are not alert-
ed early enough. For example, if an outage occurs overnight, it
might not be detected until the morning. This delay creates a time
crunch to get the right people involved to fix the problem.
CSR needed a monitoring and automation solution that would
quickly correlate alerts and incidents for a wider array of technol-
ogies beyond SAP applications — namely Microsoft’s System Cen-
ter Operations Manager (MS SCOM). “We run a lot of Microsoft
and broad user base. Like most companies, the business is always
looking for ways to increase the value of its IT investments and
reduce its maintenance costs. To that end, in 2007, the company
decided to migrate its SAP data from an Oracle database to a
Microsoft SQL database. During the migration, CSR began to
experience IT stability issues, including some SAP system outages
— the longest outage lasted eight hours and affected a number of
business functions.
“Our SAP ERP system is mission-critical to us,” explains Adam
Bunn, SAP Basis Team Lead at CSR. “It literally opens our cash
register drawers in our retail outlets. And some of our facto-
ries dispatch products 24 hours a day. So if the system is down,
we can’t process the dispatch paperwork and trucks back up at
the docks while we’re forced to manually write out the proper
documentation. Those sorts of issues have a direct impact on our
ability to do business.”
An outage will be extended if the right people are not alert-
ed early enough. For example, if an outage occurs overnight, it
might not be detected until the morning. This delay creates a time
crunch to get the right people involved to fix the problem.
CSR needed a monitoring and automation solution that would
quickly correlate alerts and incidents for a wider array of technol-
ogies beyond SAP applications — namely Microsoft’s System Cen-
ter Operations Manager (MS SCOM). “We run a lot of Microsoft
CSR’s Monitoring Functionality
Wish List
CSR defined specific requirements when
seeking out a monitoring and alerting
solution. Functionalities the business
liked in SAP IT Process Automation by
Cisco included:
seeking out a monitoring and alerting
solution. Functionalities the business
liked in SAP IT Process Automation by
Cisco included:
• Ability to switch on only specific SAP
alerts
• Customizable parameters for alert
threshold and context
• Simple wizard to add/remove/change
alerting SAP systems
• Integration with external alerting systems
like MS SCOM
• Automated incident analysis and diagnostic
reporting that creates alerts for real issues
that might directly affect users
that might directly affect users
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