Solution Manager Is Being Phased Out: Switching to Cloud ALM Is Not a Major Project

The tenant is provisioned in minutes, eligible customers pay no additional license fees, and the operational setup takes about two person-days. Those who get started now can take their time deciding which Solution Manager features they actually still need.

Things aren't going as planned

Mainstream maintenance for SAP Solution Manager 7.2 ends on December 31, 2027. SAP recommends that all customers complete the transition to SAP Cloud ALM before that date. That much is already known. However, there is a widely circulated misconception that simply isn’t true: that we have until 2030. Extended Maintenance through the end of 2030 is tied to Extended Maintenance for SAP Business Suite 7 and is therefore not available to every customer. Companies that do not purchase Extended Maintenance for SAP Business Suite 7 will switch to Customer-Specific Maintenance after 2027 for SolMan functions not covered by Extended Maintenance. The deadline therefore depends on the company’s respective ECC status, not on a general roadmap specification.

For the CIO and IT leadership, this is a governance issue, not a technical one. It should be resolved before the operations team has to deal with it. One side effect is rarely taken into account. For many midsize companies, Solution Manager is the last system running on the AS Java stack. The teams are happy to get rid of this component because they lack the expertise to maintain it anyway.

Three Mistakes That Delay the Launch

The real reason for the hesitation isn't the technology. It's three assumptions that regularly turn out to be wrong in projects.

First: the costs. SAP Cloud ALM is available to eligible SAP customers at no additional licensing cost. You can check your eligibility in SAP for Me with just a few clicks. A significant number of customers are unaware of this and mentally calculate a budget that doesn’t actually apply.

Second: the memory limit. SAP has raised the base memory limit to 24 GB under its fair-use policy. In practice, this limit is rarely reached. A customer with about 18 connected landscapes and a broad cloud service portfolio uses approximately 6 GB of HANA memory without having adjusted any housekeeping settings. That is one-quarter of the fair-use limit.

Third: the effort involved. The tenant is provisioned in minutes, while connecting individual systems takes hours. There is no need for an agent rollout, as is the case with Solution Manager. Existing operations continue to run in parallel; SAP Cloud ALM does not interfere with ongoing processes. A recurring pattern illustrates just how low the barrier to entry actually is: There are customers who have provisioned the tenant and connected an initial sandbox system, but then stopped because they feared the need to acquire a massive amount of new knowledge. The decision is therefore usually made at the team leadership level, not by the investment committee.

What SolMan Could Never Do

Anyone who views the transition merely as a mandatory task is missing the bigger picture. SAP Cloud ALM monitors cloud services and on-premises systems in a single interface, including certificates and API keys—for example, for the SAP Cloud Connector and the Integration Suite. Solution Manager did not cover this cloud-based aspect, and that is precisely where the landscapes are expanding. Expired API keys for a subaccount are a classic silent failure. Nothing crashes, nothing triggers an alert—the interface simply stops working. This becomes apparent when the business department calls. SAP Cloud ALM provides configurable warnings—for example, 90 days before expiration—with a critical reminder 30 days beforehand. Alerts are sent to where the work is happening: to the Teams channel, to Jira, or to ServiceNow, rather than to an inbox that’s already overflowing. This isn’t just a matter of convenience. There are existing customers who made the switch precisely because of this feature, since expired keys regularly brought their operations to a standstill.

The second area is centralized transport management for on-premises and cloud development, featuring a Fiori interface and eliminating the need for manual export and import steps. In practice, the onboarding process almost always begins with Operations, while the Implementation area is left aside. This is usually due to the wording of the documentation, not the substance of the matter: Technicians have less process work there than they assume.

The Path to That, Without the Big Bang

The transition to SAP Cloud ALM is taking place in stages: a readiness check in Solution Manager, followed by development and test systems, and then production. Both tools can be run in parallel and compared with each other in monitoring. Two pitfalls make the preparatory work worthwhile. Identity management should be linked to the production IAS tenant from the start; otherwise, parallel tenants will be created without synchronization. And certain metrics, such as file system monitoring, will primarily generate false alarms without prior configuration. Both issues can be corrected later, but doing so is unnecessarily costly. Important for risk assessment: SAP Cloud ALM is an orchestration layer, not a single point of failure. If the service goes down, transports via the TMS can still be performed manually—unlike with ChaRM or Focus Build. This makes the transition manageable and reversible at any time. To date, there are hardly any existing SAP customers who have regretted making the switch. The process ranges from an enablement session—in which the team performs the deployment itself and learns as they go—to the complete setup of the tenant, system integration, and cloud services by Entplexit.

Conclusion

The deadline is approaching, but the effort involved is predictable. Those who wait don’t lose technology—they lose flexibility. The most costly mistake when migrating to SAP Cloud ALM is waiting. Those who start early can decide for themselves which Solution Manager functions they actually still need, rather than having to recreate them under time pressure. (Source: Entplexit)