SAP Solution Manager’s mainstream maintenance ends December 31, 2027, with extended maintenance available through 2030 for an additional fee, though not covering every function, per SAP Note 3255311. For Basis engineers and IT operations leaders who’ve run change management, monitoring, and landscape management through Solution Manager for years, that’s close enough to warrant planning now, especially alongside whatever other SAP transformation work is already on the calendar. This guide maps what Solution Manager actually covers, what its main successors handle today, and how to plan the transition without leaving gaps.
What Solution Manager Actually Covers
SAP Solution Manager includes five core functions: Change Request Management (ChaRM), IT Service Management (ITSM), technical monitoring, test management, and landscape and process management. It grew into this all-purpose role over nearly two decades, which is exactly why replacing it isn’t a single like-for-like swap. Not every organization uses every part of it. The first step in planning a replacement is mapping which of these your team actually depends on day to day:
- Change Request Management (ChaRM): governs how changes and transports move through a landscape with an auditable approval trail.
- IT Service Management (ITSM): incident, problem, and service request management for SAP environments.
- Technical monitoring: system and business process health monitoring across the landscape.
- Test management: test case management, risk-based testing, and test data management.
- Landscape and process management: system landscape documentation and business process hierarchies, plus routine tasks like EarlyWatch alerts, MOPZ, and central customizing.
Larger, more complex environments tend to lean heaviest on ChaRM and ITSM specifically. The 2027 deadline is also a natural point to look at how much of this is still manual versus automated today, independent of which replacement you land on, since that’s often where the bigger operational win sits.
SAP’s Official Successor: Cloud ALM
SAP positions SAP Cloud ALM as the go-to application lifecycle management platform going forward and recommends starting the transition now. It’s included in Enterprise Support at no additional license cost, which makes it the default first stop for most organizations.
Cloud ALM is organized around four capability areas: Business Transformation, Implementation, Operations, and Service Administration. The Implementation side covers requirements management, process documentation, and test management, including manual and automated test orchestration with full traceability from requirement to test to deployment, which is genuinely useful for a project team running fit-to-standard workshops. The Operations side adds application health monitoring, business process monitoring, and integration monitoring for systems already running in the cloud.
One caveat worth planning around: Cloud ALM was built cloud-first, and SAP doesn’t position it as a one-to-one replacement for Solution Manager. ChaRM in particular isn’t included in a directly comparable form yet, since Cloud ALM’s change and release tooling is lighter-weight and built around cloud release cycles rather than the transport-based approval chains ChaRM manages. Coverage for large, on-premise-heavy, or highly customized landscapes is also still maturing relative to what Solution Manager’s decade-plus of feature accumulation covers.
Where Focused Run Fits
SAP Focused Run is sometimes confused with Cloud ALM, but it solves a different problem: high-volume, complex-landscape technical monitoring, built to run on HANA and scale to thousands of systems in a way Solution Manager’s architecture wasn’t designed for. Its maintenance sits on an independent timeline that continues past 2027, so adopting Cloud ALM doesn’t retire the need for Focused Run in large estates.
Focused Run’s coverage is broader than its “monitoring tool” reputation suggests. Beyond system, job, and integration monitoring, it includes Configuration and Security Analytics, which compares system settings against a defined security baseline and flags deviations, and an optional Cybersecurity Extension that adds vulnerability management, patch tracking, and custom code scanning on top of that.
It’s also the tool most commonly used by MSPs and large enterprises specifically because it scales to monitor very large numbers of systems from one place, which is exactly why organizations managing SAP operations across many business units or customers gravitate toward it. What it doesn’t cover is ChaRM, the broader ALM and process-management side of Solution Manager, or true multi-tenant administration, managing separate customer or BTP tenants as distinct, isolated units rather than just monitoring more systems inside a single hub.
That’s worth confirming directly since it’s a common point of confusion: covering everything Solution Manager did typically means combining more than one tool, and that’s true across the market, not a gap specific to any one vendor.
Comparing the Alternatives
Stated individually rather than only in the table below: Solution Manager, Focused Run, and, increasingly, Cloud ALM all handle technical monitoring natively, though how much of that monitoring turns into automated action rather than manual review varies by platform. Security operations and FinOps are where the differences are starkest: Cloud ALM treats security largely as an add-on and leaves cost management to the separate BTP Cockpit, while Solution Manager was never built for either, and Focused Run covers security through its own dedicated extension.
Automation is uneven across the board: Solution Manager needed a separate product (LaMa) for landscape automation, and Cloud ALM leans on optional add-on services rather than built-in automation. Multi-tenant management, relevant to MSPs and large enterprises running many Cloud ALM instances or BTP tenants, isn’t something any of SAP’s own tools were built to unify on their own. Change management (ChaRM) is the one area Solution Manager still covers most completely, and it’s also the area where Cloud ALM and Focused Run currently offer the least direct coverage.
| Function | Solution Manager | SAP Cloud ALM | Focused Run | Avantra |
| Technical monitoring | Native | Growing, cloud-first | Native, complex landscapes | Native, 160+ checks + AI root cause analysis |
| Security operations | Limited | Partial, via add-on services | Native, via Cybersecurity Extension | Certificate mgmt, HotNews/Security Notes, config drift, kernel upgrades |
| FinOps / cloud cost | Not covered | Out of scope (BTP Cockpit) | Not covered | Native consumption and idle-system monitoring |
| Automation | Limited, LaMa required separately | Partial, via add-on services | Limited | Hundreds of checks, Ansible support, automated system refresh |
| Multi-tenant support | Not covered | Single-tenant only | Not covered | Enterprise hub across Cloud ALM instances, BTP tenants, on-prem |
| Change mgmt (ChaRM) | Native | Partial | Not covered | Not a core focus |
A Realistic Sequence for Planning This
Rather than evaluating all three replacement candidates at once, most organizations move through this in a fairly consistent order:
- Audit current usage. Pull actual usage data on which Solution Manager work centers and functions get touched weekly versus which have quietly gone unused for years; most landscapes carry more configured-but-idle functionality than anyone remembers turning on.
- If ChaRM is heavily used, start that evaluation now, not last. Change governance typically has the longest lead time of anything on this list, since it usually involves compliance sign-off and a genuinely separate vendor decision, and no available tool covers it directly today. Organizations that leave it for last tend to end up making a rushed choice close to the 2027 deadline.
- Map every other function to a category. Governance (ITSM), technical operations (monitoring/automation/security/FinOps), or both, using the table above as a starting template rather than a final answer.
- Start the Cloud ALM migration regardless. Since it’s included in Enterprise Support and SAP is directing investment there, there’s little reason to delay standing it up for the implementation and process-documentation work it already handles well.
- Layer in an operational platform in parallel. Don’t wait for the Cloud ALM migration to finish before addressing monitoring, security, and automation. Running both simultaneously is the more common pattern than a strict handoff.
What to Look for in a Replacement
- Whether you need governance (ChaRM/ITSM), technical operations (monitoring/automation/security/FinOps), or both, since no single tool covers everything Solution Manager did. Buying a tool that’s strong on one and assuming it covers the other is the most common planning mistake here.
- Hybrid and on-premise support if the landscape isn’t fully cloud yet, since this is where Cloud ALM is still catching up; a tool built cloud-first often means agent-based or on-premise monitoring gets treated as a secondary use case rather than a primary one.
- How much of the replacement is actually automated versus still manual, since monitoring alone doesn’t recover the operational time Solution Manager, in practice, still requires from Basis teams. A tool that surfaces more alerts without reducing the manual work to act on them just moves the bottleneck.
- The full cost across every tool actually needed, since “free with Enterprise Support” for Cloud ALM often means paying elsewhere, including for security automation and FinOps, to close the remaining gaps. Price out the full stack, not just the headline free component.
How Avantra Fits: Alongside Solution Manager Today, Cloud ALM Tomorrow
The practical answer for most organizations isn’t a single swap-in replacement. It’s adding an operational layer that works with whatever ALM platform sits underneath, Solution Manager now, Cloud ALM as that transition happens, without a forced cutover. Avantra runs alongside Solution Manager today, extending it with automation, security operations, FinOps visibility, and AI-driven diagnostics, and integrates directly with SAP Cloud ALM as organizations adopt it, so the shift happens incrementally rather than as a single risky cutover.
With Avantra 26, that includes Avantra AIR, an AI-driven root cause analysis engine that correlates logs, alerts, and system data across an estate to surface probable causes and next steps automatically. Early adopters report up to a 60% reduction in mean time to insight and resolution.
Avantra 26 also added deeper, two-way SAP Cloud ALM integration and BTP FinOps observability, monitoring cloud spend and utilization the same way it monitors system health.
That combination is why Avantra customers managing complex, multi-tenant SAP operations, like Protera, use it to extend Cloud ALM with centralized observability and policy control across their estate rather than treating the two as separate tools to reconcile.
The scope worth being clear about: Avantra isn’t built to replace ChaRM’s change-governance workflow. Most organizations pair Avantra’s operational layer with a dedicated ALM or ITSM tool if they rely heavily on that specific function.
FAQ
What replaces SAP Solution Manager?
There’s no single one-to-one replacement. Most organizations move core lifecycle management to SAP Cloud ALM over time while running an operational platform like Avantra alongside it for monitoring, security, automation, and FinOps, plus a dedicated ALM/ITSM tool if they rely heavily on ChaRM.
When does Solution Manager maintenance end?
Mainstream maintenance ends December 31, 2027. Extended maintenance is available through 2030 for an additional fee, though some functionality is excluded regardless, per SAP Note 3255311.
Is SAP Cloud ALM a full replacement for Solution Manager?
No. SAP doesn’t position it as a one-to-one replacement, and ChaRM in particular isn’t included in a directly comparable form.
Does Avantra replace Solution Manager entirely?
No, and that’s largely the point. Avantra runs alongside Solution Manager with no forced cutover, extending it with automation, security operations, FinOps, and AI-driven root cause analysis, then continues working the same way as organizations adopt SAP Cloud ALM.
Conclusion
Solution Manager’s 2027 deadline forces a decision about where SAP’s core ALM platform goes next, but it doesn’t force choosing one tool to replace everything Solution Manager did. For most organizations, the practical path is layering an operational platform on top of whatever’s underneath, extending Solution Manager today and Cloud ALM as that transition happens, rather than a single risky cutover.
For more on the timeline and what’s at stake, see our companion piece, The End of SAP Solution Manager and What It Means for You, or browse our full Solution Manager alternatives hub. Book a demo to see how Avantra runs alongside Solution Manager and Cloud ALM across a hybrid estate.