Charm Down Grade Protection

Change Request Management

ALM Solution Management

May, 2012

Usage & Configuration of Downgrade Protection

2012 SAP AG. All rights reserved. 2 RKT

Downgrade Protection - Introduction

Downgrade Protection functionalities help you to increase consistency throughout your

system landscape by identifying parallel developments on same objects or customizing

settings.

It helps you to minimize the risk for downgrades by providing new checks on top of the existing

Cross System Object Lock functionalities.

Developers and Administrators will receive warning messages or errors, depending on the

configuration of the downgrade protection settings.

If conflicts are detected, the related transport management activity will be canceled by default to proceed it is required to specifically tell the system to ignore those conflicts.


Downgrade Protection and Risk Mitigation

Multiple Downgrade Checks

At Change Recording

Before Export

When Reassigning Change

Before Import

Receive warnings before creating potential downgrade situations

or creating a real downgrade


How to use it?

Conflicts that have been found will be reported in the Downgrade Protection Assignment Block.

The Assignment Block is visible on all transport related Change Documents, and the Change

Cycle document.

Conflicts that have been detected need to be ignored, to proceed with the transport related

action. By default the transport action will be canceled if there is at least one open conflict. It is

possible to ignore conflicts for certain systems / system-roles / projects by default this is part of the configuration and customizing.


Assignment Block Overview

Check details of a conflict

Ignore conflict

Conflicting

Object Number of Transport

Object-Conflicts

Conflict status

(open or ignored)

Confirmation

Popup when

ignoring

conflicts

Conflict status

(open or ignored)

Show all conflicts, including conflicts that have

been ignored due to configuration


Conflict Details

Status and Type of

Conflict

Conflict Details:

Transport, Object,

Table

Hint for risk of

conflict

Checked object Further

Information

about Conflict

Responsible

Persons


Activation of Downgrade Protection

Downgrade Protection (DGP) is connected to the Cross System Object Lock functionalities in

SAP Solution Manager you need to activate both: CSOL and DGP.

The customizing settings can be found in IMG (Transaction SPRO) of SAP Solution Manager.

Follow this path:

SAP Solution Manager Capabilities (Optional) Change Management Extended Configuration Cross System Object Lock and Downgrade Protection Configure and Activate Cross-System Object Lock


Configuration of Downgrade Protection

Once the general activation of CSOL and DGP has been made, the detailed customizing

settings can be found in IMG (Transaction SPRO) of SAP Solution Manager. Follow this path:

SAP Solution Manager Capabilities (Optional) Change Management Extended Configuration Cross System Object Lock and Downgrade Protection Configure Downgrade Protection


Customizing 1) Conflict Types

There are four different types of downgrade checks:

Release check, Reassign check, Predecessor check,

Imminent check

Release check and reassign check are release

checks, whereas predecessor check and imminent

check are import checks. Imminent downgrade

would mean to actively create a downgrade, by

continuing with the import.

The checks are either triggered automatically when releasing transport requests, importing a transport or decoupling a transport, and

when reassigning a change document, or they can be triggered manually. For each check type, you can configure the conflict criticality

and an icon, so you can classify the criticality of this check type as: Warning, Critical and Very Critical

Example: If you set the conflict type for the release check to Warning and assign the warning icon, the system displays a conflict that is found when releasing a transport request as a warning and shows the yellow warning icon.

Note: There can only be one configuration record for each check type. The default configuration contains recommended values.


Customizing 2) System Types (Exception List)

Caution: Incorrect settings in this table will result in malfunction of the downgrade protection mechanism, and endanger the

consistency of your system landscape.

Downgrade protection performs its checks in relation to the Change Request Management system landscape of the

project. For example, in a development system you can create and release transport requests. When releasing a

transport request, the release check is performed in the development system. The quality assurance system, pre-

production system or production system also accepts imports, so the two downgrade protection checks (predecessor

and imminent downgrade checks) are also performed in those target systems.

All conflicts found in a check are shown in the Downgrade Protection assignment block in the WebClient UI. The user

can then either ignore the conflicts, or try to resolve them manually (for example, by importing a dependent transport

in advance).

If the release check or the import check find new conflicts, or other conflicts in status Open that are not ignored, the release or the import will be canceled.


Customizing 2) System Types (Exception List)

In this activity, you can configure which system,

system role, project or conflict type automatically

bypasses the release check or import check, even

when conflicts are found. The level of conflict types,

from low to high, is:

Warning,

Critical,

Very Critical

Example:

Record in Customizing table: AB1, 200, T, *, Import, Critical

Behavior: Import to AB1:200 will always be allowed by downgrade protection, if the conflict type is lower than Critical and the system role in the project is T (by default the Quality Assurance system). This applies to all projects (*). If a record specifies a project ID, the record will be effective only for that project.

Note: By default, the table is empty, for security reasons, so all conflicts will result in the cancelation of the corresponding

action.


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