Monitor SAP CPI system performance

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Many of the customers I talk with start to see the SAP Cloud Platform Integration(CPI) as a critical tool for their integration needs. In that perspective, it makes sense to be proactive and monitor how it performances.

There are two pages that you can use to check the status reported by SAP as I write about on my blog it is the pages Cloud Status and Status page. They may be relevant to monitor both to warn about what is happening in your landscape.

But what about how to monitor you own tenant and how it is performing. That is the question that most people want to answer because it is what matters for them and then sooner they know about an issue they can setup manual processing or figure out how to do something else. It also provides a way to to messuare if SAP is living up to the SLA of CPI.

How you can messure your CPI tennant

You can setup logging in a number of different tool that will give you some indication of how the system is responding. You can also use the Figaf IRT tool that now will allow you to monitor your CPI system. It is pretty simple and does not require any coding form your side.

You will have a dashboard that looks like the following to see the performance of your system. You can see on the diagram that the system is down for maintenance for a period of time over the weekend. It is possible to see we cannot access the management and runtime engine for a period of time. This is a partner tenant so there may be a different performance and number of nodes as a real system. The system also calls an integration flow every 5 minutes to measure how the runtime is perfroming. This is then returning a response, but from time to time it takes almost 2 second to perform. Also, notice that during the maintenance period we still get a response in the range 400 ms. If it is possible to call process messages even when there is a maintenance window it is pretty cool.

Current view of the SAP CPI monitoring

We are now collecting all the metrics for this. Next is that we will be setting up alerts on this with our alert engine. Then you can get a notification if you are getting latencies above, i.e. 2 seconds or the CPU load is above 80%. Or create a Jira ticket with the simple webhook. We will also be adding status of your JMS queue and other relevant metrics asked for by users.

We have monitoring packages starting at only 150 EUR/Month and then you can also monitor other iflows.

Try it out at IRTCloud or you can also try it on your own deployment of the IRT server you can run on your own cloud. It also has quite a lot of other options to monitor SAP CPI both trigger alerts for failed messages, restart CPI messages and give users access to monitor data them self.

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Automated SAP PIT Test case creation

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A month ago SAP released a testing tool for SAP PI/PO. One thing I have been contemplating a lot is how to test the first upgrade. One challenge with the SAP PIT testing tool is to be able to run a test on your first upgrade with the tool. I do see a problem with the first two upgrades. If you accept the premise that we need to test all upgrades for SAP PI/PO and therefore need a tool for it. Then it has some challenges for the beginning.

The first upgrade

The system needs you to implement OSS Note 2650265 which is an upgrade to MESSAGING SYSTEM SERVICE released February 2019 and applies to many services packs for 7.31 and above. If you want to implement this upgrade you will need to patch all components because they are linked in SAP Netweaver Java. This means that for this to work you need to implement quite a number of changes for it to work. I see the process as the following:

  1. Implement the patch according to the note on your development system.
  2. Since you don’t know if any thing is affected you will need to run a full test with your SAP PI
  3. Implement the note in production
  4. Once the note is in production you can upgrade your development system to 7.5 SP 14.
  5. Then you can start to create test cases on the 7.5 SP14 and validate that nothing has changed. You will then compare production data with data on SP14 so you cannot compare how the upgrade works.
  6. Once you are done with creating the test cases you can implement SP 14 in your landscape
  7. Next upgrade can be made a bit easier because you have the test data

For me it does sound like a lot of extra manual tests and changes to your landscape limiting how much you can do in the process.

Figaf IRT

The Figaf tools allow you to test all SAP PI 7.31, 7.4 and 7.5 system without installing new support packs. We have a number of options to record messages. Either as SAP is doing with looking in the log messages, except we can use a patch that is 2 years old to enrich your monitoring web services. Or we even have a web scraping option that is even older than it. But we do have a better solution which is to add a module to your processing chain. That way you can test much faster on your system with a lower impact on them.

Screenshot of the new button to export data to PIT

SAP Customers prefer to use standard tools, in the places where it makes sense and they can find enough value. We, therefore, are working on a way to enable you to export your Figaf IRT test cases to SAP PIT, so you can stop using the Figaf tools for testing. This way you can use Figaf to help test the first upgrades and then use SAP PIT for the future

We do hope that we are proving enough value together with ways to make your SAP testing better and faster, and also allow you tigth itnegration to test the interfaces that you are changing.

How how does the migration work

It is a pretty simple just process. Once you have a Testing Template in Figaf IRT and have run it you will see the Export to PIT button. The messages then exist on your SAP PI system. Figaf IRT will create a Test Suite in PIT with the same messages. IRT know which messages should be added to the test cases so it will request. Then it is just up to PIT to fetch the messages.

It is a licensed feature of the Figaf IRT so you will need to purchase a license, it can save you some time for your testing.

You can see a demo of it here.

There will be a few more changes to make for the process to work, like:

  • Set a name for the template
  • Send ignoring elements over to the test case
  • Update it the process if PITs API is changing since it is not published.

There may also come future development in the PIT tool, we can use to run this process better. Lets see in the next support packs. It is possible to add running of tests cases and integrate it with our DevOps appoach so you can test the interfaces that is changed by a mapping.

If you want to see how fast you can create test cases in Figaf and run your tests in it then download the tool for free and get started in an hour. We do also have many extra features that you will not find in SAP PIT.

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Webinar replay: Why you should test SAP PI/CPI

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Do you want to learn how to test your SAP PI/PO system for upgrades in a smarter way? That was the main focus on the webinar, I held Thursday 28., March 2019. At the webinar, I covered the following topics:

– Why you should be testing your solution
– How the SAP PI testing solution (PIT) works and its limitations. Like it is pretty difficult to test the first upgrade because there is a need to make patch uploads.
– What a tool for testing your interfaces should be able to
– How a test tool will improve your sap pi upgrade and patches

I do show a short demo of you can set up test cases with the Figaf tool and can create multiple test cases in just one go. Anonymize the test data so you can run a test with even sensitive data.

Here you can watch the full replay (47 minutes):

Please also see the slideshow

I have also made a slideshow, which I hope you will like:

So, are ready to take your workflow to the next level with Figaf Integration Regression Tool? Then push the button below.

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Figaf IRT now supports API management

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Over the last couple of weeks, we have been making transports easier for SAP CPI. Now the turn has come to SAP API management. As I understand from APIGEE the normal way is to have a build server that allows you to transport and test scripts. It does require some time and skill in setting up such a server. From the last roadmap session SAP was planing to relase some CTS+ integration in Q3 if I recall correct.

We are using the same approach to document changes of APIProxies. So you can see which Proxy part has been updated, or which script was changed. This makes it a lot easier to document what is going on and why something was changed. You will therefore know what is changed in each release.

We also allows users to make transports based on the business requirements. It is therefore easier to document changes made to the proxy, and link all changes to a business reason.

You can try it out your self at Figaf IRTCloud and see how it performs in your landscape.

With Figaf IRT you have one enviorment that allow you to document all your SAP Integrations in just one application.

We are going to add other functions to monitor your API management, so you can get some more detailed alerts about what is going on in your landscape.

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New Monitor for SAP CPI

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After working with SAP CPI for some period of time, I did find it a little difficult to monitor the application. So we decided that we could add a better way to monitor the application and include it into the Figaf IRT application. Because the purpose is to make your usage of SAP Integration easier.

We are reusing the tile concept from SAP CPI, that allows you to create different tiles with different concepts. So you in one screen can see multiply overviews of what is happing on your system. We are using the OData monitoring service that allow us to give users access to data. IRT just work as a proxy and perform the query in real time without saving anything to the Figaf IRT application. We also have the other option and it is really useful for triggering alerts or restart messages.


Up can edit the tiles and write what you want to see in it. You do have the option to select multiply iflows in just one screen, different periods and status. Based on the name IRT then creates two roles on that can view the metadata of the message and one that can view the payloads. It mean that you can give access to tiles for business users. So the people from finace will be able to see all tiles related to finance but not monitor HR. Admins can still monitor everything.

Once you open the monitor you then have the option to view multiply rows in and relavant data in the overview screen. This allow you to search a lot easier for messages with some application id or Receiver.
You can also do filtering in the iflow you have access to already. This way users can only see the data they need.

Check out the easy way of monitoring your SAP CPI flow.

I do believe that this will make it a lot easier to monitor your SAP CPI system. And give access to other users to monitor what is going on in your processes.

You can view my video presentation of it here.

You can try it out IRT/Cloud soon. You can signup already now and start using all the other function there to help improve your SAP CPI development flow. There is a free 30 day trial that you can try for your organisation.

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