Security & SAP HotNews

Avantra allows you to use the data of SAP HotNews, i.e. SAP notes with priority 1 (very high), for further analysis. The data can be accessed directly from the Avantra WebUI, there you can also see which system is affected by SAP HotNews. The feature is available from version 21.11.

Before you can access SAP HotNews there is a single step of configuration that is needed: Select Configuration  Integrations from the top-level menu. Then select SAP Backbone and maintain the required user and password using a “technical” S-User and also enable the download of SAP HotNews.

In Integrations  SAP backbone a status may be configured which affects the status of SAP System Note entries (SAP Notes applied to a system). When the administrator of the SAP System updates the software component and the SAP Note does not apply anymore to the new version of the component, the configured Implementation Status is automatically applied to the SAP System note.

If the status is not set (--), the SAP System Note status will remain unchanged.

If the SAP System Note status is already in a terminal state (Implemented / Not Relevant), the status remains unchanged as well.

The SAP System Note status will be set to the configured status in all other cases.

To access SAP HotNews: Select Support  SAP HotNews from the top-level menu. Check the data in the opened tab.

New notes over the last 10 days are downloaded, though for an initial download, when first using SAP HotNews, this can be overridden and set to a number of years. A note relevance calculation process automatically determines which notes are relevant for which SAP systems allowing the analysis to be performed.

SAP HotNews Analysis allows you to maintain two different statuses for each displayed note. An overall note-level status as well as a SAP system-level note implementation status. There are three note-level statuses, New, Active and Inactive. Whenever a new HotNews note version is delivered by the download service, it is inserted with status New, meaning the note version needs to be reviewed. If the review determines some HotNews to be irrelevant due to the current infrastructure and processes then theses can be set to the Inactive status. Inactive notes are not considered in the note relevance calculation process and can be filtered out from the view. Finally, the Active status means that the note was reviewed and selected for further processing.

Both New and Active notes are picked up by the relevance calculation process. There are four SAP System-level note implementation statuses which are New, To be implemented, Implemented and Not relevant. Whenever the relevance calculation process finds a SAP system that it determines is relevant for the given HotNews, it is added to the note implementation scope with status New. These New entries have to be reviewed and a decision made whether the note implementation is required or not. In the later case, the status is then manually set to Not relevant, allowing there to be an audit trail for decisions made for a given system. Otherwise, the status To be implemented is set allowing the use of the available filter All notes with systems to be implemented to render a note implementation worklist. Finally, when the note implementation is done, the status is switched to Implemented.