Monitoring in Different Systems

SAP S/4HANA has different monitors for web service messages (used, for instance, for business partners and products) and IDocs (used, for instance, for sales orders).

You can monitor web service-based communication using transaction SRT_UTIL. From this transaction, you can open the Error Log or the Message Monitor, and can even initiate more advanced features, such as payload or functional traces. The message monitor can also be reached directly using transaction SRT_MONI and the error log using transaction SRT_ELOG. Although the message monitor shows successful, currently processed, and erroneous messages, there are some kinds of errors that only show up in the error log. That means, if you have trouble finding a message, you should always check both logs.

For monitoring IDoc-based communication, there are several transactions with different features. With transaction WE02, you can list IDocs of all processing states, based on the direction (inbound or outbound) and their type. You can also view the payload (look into the IDoc) with a double-click on the respective row. The following screenshot shows that.

Alternatively, you can use transaction BD87 to access another monitor where you can select IDocs based on their processing status. This transaction also allows you to Process IDocs that are not yet processed. Without transaction BD87, you need to use a program to select and process IDocs.

Processing and monitoring is one of the main tasks of a middleware. In Cloud Integration, the Monitoring / Operations section is the entrance to the message monitor. It contains several tiles that show the number of processed messages matching different criteria, such as successful within the past hour, erroneous, and so on. You can adapt tiles or add new ones.

Selecting a tile leads you to the actual message monitor and automatically applies the filters that are defined for the tile. Select a message to see further details, such as the sender and receiver, the message ID, existing logs, and so on.

In contrast to the other systems, by default, it's not possible to see the content of a message. This feature needs to be enabled by the tenant administrator and requires integration flows to be set into Trace mode before the message is processed. Trace mode can only be activated for a limited period of time and is disabled automatically after that.

SAP Sales and Service Cloud offers the Web Service Message Monitor in work center Administration → view General Settings. By default, only asynchronous web service messages, and synchronous messages that caused an error are listed here. To monitor successful synchronous web service communication, you need to activate the Trace that you can find in the toolbar. Depending on the window size, some features are placed in the three-dot menu.

The web service message monitor uses some kind of buffer to display the message list. It is important to refresh this buffer also right after opening it. You can use the Refresh button in the toolbar that is sometimes also shifted into the three-dot menu.

You can use the advanced filter to define and combine different filter criteria and hence reduce the amount of displayed messages, or find specific messages, for instance by their message ID or by the internal or external ID of the contained object. Moreover, you can restart or cancel messages that are in an error state with the respective buttons from the toolbar. Those buttons exist twice: Once as simple buttons that apply the operation to selected messages, and once with a dropdown menu where you can choose between Selected and Based on filter criteria. The latter executes the operation for all messages of the currently applied filters. This allows you to restart or cancel messages for a huge number of messages.

Finally, you can view the message content (payload) and error log details of a selected message by choosing the corresponding entry from the View dropdown menu.

Besides the web service message monitor, SAP Sales and Service Cloud also offers the OData Monitor that can be used to monitor OData calls. This course focuses on web service messages and doesn't use OData integration scenarios. Hence, the OData monitor is only mentioned for the sake of completeness. It must be activated in scoping before it shows up in the Administrator workcenter → General Settings view. After activating it, you must adapt your user's access rights to be able to open it.