How to monitor Cloud integrations?

Effective operational support tools help speed up the process of resolving issues that commonly arise when exchanging data between systems. The more data systems exchange with each other, the more likely an error is to occur. Despite great efforts during implementation to minimize the risk of error occurrence, such as by enabling format checking and other control mechanisms, it is virtually impossible to prevent error occurrence altogether. Effective operational support tools, including monitoring tools, help to keep data exchange between systems to a minimum in the event of a problem. As long as the system administrator or administrator uses the right tool, he or she can analyze problems much more quickly. The most common errors occur when communication is lost, which can be identified quite easily and quickly. However, bigger problems arise if the problem is in the data itself that is being transferred between the systems, or if the expected data does not arrive at all. After all, how to find something that is not ? 😊

In such cases, the way the integration interfaces are implemented plays a very important role. When designing or implementing a solution, it is necessary to think not only about the quality and full functionality of the interface, but also about the operation of the interface. That is why we often supply our customers with a manual that describes the most common problems that may arise, including instructions on how to solve them, in addition to the standard documentation. It is only during the sharp operation that it becomes clear how the interface implementer thought about the operation support, and what real experience and benefits he brought with him to the project 😊.

In our newsletter, we are primarily focused on integrations in the Cloud environment, so we will introduce you to the possibilities for monitoring offered by the cloud integration platform SAP Integration Suite. In addition to the standard tool for monitoring transfers, which is available directly in the integration platform, it offers several additional options. These are tools that extend the capabilities of standard monitoring but are created and run in other SAP applications. These are in particular SAP Cloud ALM (Application Lifecycle Management), SAP Solution Manager, SAP Focused Run or SAP Analytics Cloud. All of these tools offer various functionalities regarding data exchange in the Cloud, such as graphs, statistics, data sorting according to various criteria, as well as detailed information about statuses and technical data. All of these options are really nice, but we are still missing some functionality there. Since the implementation phase of the solution and the testing phase are the most intensive to find bugs, we were looking for a suitable solution to simplify this phase and also to bring the best possible tools to the future administrator to find and solve the problem quickly. Fortunately, in addition to the standard tools, SAP Cloud also has the SAP Application Interface Framework (OData APIs) open source, which can be used to create your own tools and which we ended up using 😊.

Since we have many years of experience with integrations, including their support in operation, we have created our own monitoring tool, where we have capitalized on all our years of professional experience and knowledge. We called the tool “Advanced Monitoring Solution for SAP BTP” and it is currently available for the “whole world” via the SAP Store as a paid service.

This tool complements the standard monitoring tools of SAP Cloud Integration Suite with extended functionality that users have become accustomed to with on-premise solutions. The main advantage is the ability to search and filter messages based on their attributes, including the message content itself (for example, by customer number or invoice number). This feature speeds up the error resolution process tremendously. In order to be able to search the messages by content, it is necessary to modify the iFlow integration, which can be prepared by our experts or can be done by the customer according to the supplied templates and documentation. Each administrator also has the possibility to save the most used selection criteria as their own variant. The saved variants adapted for different situations are then available for immediate execution when entering the application. Another interesting feature of our Advanced Monitoring is the ability to preview a message directly from the message list. The content of the message or its attachments can be viewed or downloaded to the local system for further analysis of the transmitted data. And finally, the best part! In order to be as flexible as possible in troubleshooting, administrators can monitor and analyze transmissions via the SAP FIORI mobile client. The mobile client provides a responsive design so it can be run on a tablet or mobile phone. With such enhancements, the customer can also be assured that their systems are under constant surveillance and in the event of a problem, it will be possible to quickly and efficiently not only identify the issue but also assist in resolving it.