Types of outages
Availability of the SAP system is a critical business factor, and the highest level of availability must be provided. Therefore, you must be aware of the types of outages (planned and unplanned) and how to avoid them.
Planned outage
Planned outages are deliberate and are scheduled at a convenient time, for example, for the following purposes:
- Database administration, such as offline backup or offline reorganization
- Software maintenance of the operating system or database server
- Software upgrades of the operating system or database server
- Hardware installation or maintenance
Unplanned outage
Unplanned outages are unexpectedly caused by the failure of any SAP system component. They include hardware failures, software problems, or people and process issues.
About one-fifth of unplanned outages result from application or other software errors. These include software failures, application changes, or performance issues.
In addition, about one-fifth of unplanned outages result from operator errors and unexpected user behavior. These include changes to system components, not executing tasks or executing tasks incorrectly or out of sequence. In these cases, the original outage could have been planned but the result is that the system is down longer than planned.