Integration & Exception Monitoring

The purpose of Integration & Exception Monitoring is to provide transparency for data exchange processes. The application can help to make the problem resolution process more efficient and enables the collaboration between the Line of Business (LoB) users and the IT department.

This is done by providing you with an end-to-end monitoring by correlating single messages to end-to-end message flows across services and systems as illustrated in the following graphic:

The functionality of Integration & Exception Monitoring provides support to monitor messages processed by platforms like SAP Integration Suite as well as support of peer-to-peer interface technologies as Application Interface Framework (AIF) messages as part of SAP S/4HANA Cloud. In addition, the monitoring of integration related exceptions is provided.

The application further comes with an integrated search and track functionality, which allows you to find a single message, based on technical attributes as well as exposed business context attributes like, for example, the order number across all the components this message might have touched during its execution.

The embedded alerting capabilities can be used to inform an integration owner in IT about critical issues during the data exchange process with the possibility to drill-down into alert details.

Please watch this video to learn more about how data collection functions in Integration & Exception Monitoring:

The following screenshots showcase the key features:

The main features of Integration & Exception Monitoring can be summarized by the following capabilities:

• End-to-end monitoring by correlating single integration artifacts to end-to-end message flows across components and across technology.
• Embedded monitoring of integration-related exceptions.
• Support of message flows processed by platforms like SAP Integration Suite as well as support of peer-to-peer interface technologies as AIF messages as part of SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
• Search and track single messages based on exposed business context attributes like order number.
• Embedded alerting to inform integration owner in IT about critical issues including drill-down in alert details.
• Integration with operation automation to trigger operation flows context-sensitively.

As a prerequisite to the configuration of Integration & Exception Monitoring, it is necessary that you register the managed systems and the services that you want to monitor in SAP Cloud ALM. The way of how to register a supported service or system depends on the data collection strategy.

The configuration effort can be tailored to the complexity of your monitoring concept. The options are:

• standard setup: Simple activation of standard monitoring content without additional customizing (literally "push a button").
• expert setup: Allows the activation and deactivation of specific monitoring categories and the creation of alerts for the collected data.
• Business Service Configuration: Allows the visualization of relationships between components and to maintain message paths.

The following screenshot illustrates the setup steps for the Standard Setup:

SAP Cloud ALM contains standard monitoring content for the connected services and systems depending on the service and system type. Standard content can be activated without further configuration. Setup steps:

1. Select the systems you want to configure in the scope selection.
2. Open the Configuration tray using the rack-wheel icon.
3. Switch the lever from Off to On for the service or system for which you want to activate the monitoring.

This screenshots illustrates the setup steps for the Expert Setup:

With the Expert Setup, you can activate and deactivate single monitoring categories. You can restrict the alerted artifacts using monitoring category-specific filters and you can also create events.

The steps for the expert setup are:

1. Choose the pencil icon in the Configuration tray.
2. On the Monitoring tab, activate or deactivate monitoring categories by choosing ON or OFF.
3. Go to the Events tab. The Events page displays existing events.
4. At the end of the line you want to change, use the pointed bracket icon to open the Event Details.

Events are used to trigger a reaction if Integration & Exception Monitoring detects a situation that requires attention. These reactions can be an alert, sending a notification and/or triggering an operation flow. The screenshots below demonstrate the steps for creating a Monitoring Event:

1. Select/Change the event you want to set up from the Event Name drop-down box.
2. Adjust the default Display Name to a descriptive name.
3. Expand the Event Actions tray.
   Note

   Trigger the desired action by switching it ON or OFF using the slider button .

   The following Event Actions are available:

   • Create Alert: You can create an alert that will show up in the applications alert inbox.
   • Send EMail to: To send an email, select the recipients from the list of verified recipients by choosing the + button.
   • Start Operation Flow: To start an operation flow, select the relevant operation flow from the list of available flows using the + button.
4. Scroll down to add filters to your event, to restrict the messages you react to.
5. Expand the Filter Configuration tray:
   • Enter a filter name.
   • Select the filter category.
   • Maintain the available filter fields (Parameter Name, Operator, Value). Which filter fields are available, depends on the managed service and system and the selected category.
6. Save your changes.

The screenshots provided below demonstrate the setup process and monitoring result for the Business ServiceConfiguration:

A business service in Integration & Exception Monitoring of SAP Cloud ALM allows you to group point-to-point interfaces that belong to a more complex interface scenario. All connections that are part of a business service can then be displayed together in a topology (As shown on the right hand side of the slide above). By adding filters to the connections you can define which messages and exceptions are in scope for a business service and isolate their status information in the monitoring application.

So you can start to configure a business service:

1. Choose the Configuration button in the Integration & Exception Monitoring UI.
2. Scroll down to the Business Services section.
3. Choose the pen icon to open the Configuration for Business Services.

Follow the step-by-step instructions as provided on the SAP Cloud ALM Expert Portal, Integration & Exception Monitoring - Setup & Configuration .

Once you have configured the Integration & Exception Monitoring in SAP Cloud ALM, you can explore how to use the app. Main entry point for the user is again the Home Page:

On the Integration & Exception Monitoring Home page (1), you can monitor the status of selected services, systems, or business services as per your scope selection in a card format. Each card represents a service, system or a business service.

The card displays the status for the selected time frame. The color on the left frame of the card (2) is the overall status.

The messages on a card are displayed as per their status in respective color codes. For more information on the color code, select the information icon (3) on each card.

The exceptions on a card are displayed in numbers. By selecting Exceptions  (4), you can jump directly to the Exceptions page and view the details.

By selecting the Quality icon (5) on a card, you can view the status of data collection of the services at the category level. You can also view if there's a connectivity issue between a managed service and Integration & Exception Monitoring in SAP Cloud ALM. The overall data collection rating depends on the worst rating of any of the selected services within the scope.

By selecting the Alert number (6) of the card, you can jump to the Alerting  page and view the alert details.

You can navigate further to the Managed Component View, for example by choosing more (the 3 dots) followed by Go to Details option (7).

The following screenshot displays the Managed Component view:

The Managed Component View displays the overview of the selected managed component. The Details include:

1. The total number of Messages, Exceptions and Alerts collected for the managed component.
2. The integration topology.
3. The number of messages collected for a specific message or exception category, sorted by status.
4. Further details can be seen in the Category View, which can be reached via the navigation icon.

This screenshot displays the Category view:

The Category View displays the list of all exceptions or messages collected for a specific category (1). Use the interactive charts or attribute filters (2) to refine items in the Messages or Exceptions table. In order to check individual issues, a drill down to a single message or exception details view (3) is provided.

The screenshots below show the Message Details view:

In the Message Details View on the tab Message Details, you find the status details (1) for the message flow, which contains the status information and processing timestamps for the message.

Also the Application Data (2), which contains collected context attributes for the message, for example object references and/or technical context like business system information or reported business context.

On the tab Related Messages & Exceptions, you also find each managed component (3) the selected message was processed in, and related messages (4), for example acknowledgements or retries.

To learn how you can use the Integration & Exception Monitoring Application to analyze errors in messages, watch our demo video:

You can follow along with this demonstration either by using the SAP Cloud ALM Public Demo tenant or your own SAP Cloud ALM tenant, if this use case has already been set up. To do this, simply select the Operations group and then choose the Integration & Exception Monitoring tile.

The following screenshots display the Exception page:

On the Exceptions overview (1) page, you can view exceptions for the business services as per the scope selection in a card format (2). You get the number (count) of component-specific exceptions (3) implicitly impacting the integration or business of your cloud or hybrid scenarios for the selected time frame and scope. This allows you to see which area currently has the highest number of issues and their evolution (trend) (4).

For further analysis, drill down from a high-level perspective of all exceptions per category to the detailed descriptions of individual exceptions (5), along with relevant context information. You can do so by choosing the respective category on a card.

This screenshot displays the Tracking page:

The Tracking (1) capability allows users to search and track single messages based on specific business or application context attributes like the order number, employee ID, object reference, component name, etc. As a prerequisite, context information must be exposed by the relevant component and sent together with the message's log fragments to SAP Cloud ALM. The search is executed cross-component and cross-category. Messages that match the search query are listed under Messages, and exceptions that match the search query are listed under Exceptions. Selecting an item from the list opens the message or exception details.

To enhance your search, make use of the following functions:

• Limit your search to services, systems, or a specific business service by choosing the range (2).
• Use wildcard characters to further refine your search.
• Limit your search to a particular message category using the Related Categories option available in Advanced Search (3).
• View attributes that match your search term in the Matching Attributes column (4).

Finally a screenshot from the Alerting page:

The embedded Alert Inbox (Alerting) (1) provides the starting point for further root cause analysis. Based on the collected data, alerts for certain error situations (2) can be defined, for example messages in status ERROR on a specific component or in a specific scenario. The alert contains each message that contributed to the alert creation. In the alert details (3), you can perform actions (4) like assign a processor, add comments, or confirm an alert, send a notification, or start an operation flow.