SAP Cloud ALM : Alert & Exception Monitoring for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Extensibility Transport Management

In this blog post I will explain the end-to-end process to setup exception monitoring for Extensibility Transport Management for SAP S/4HANA Cloud systems including the creation of Alerts via Notification Management.

SAP Cloud ALM is a cloud-based innovation platform for cloud centric customers as well as for small and medium hybrid customers. From a problem management perspective SAP Cloud ALM helps ensure that issues are discovered by monitoring and alerting and routed to the correct audience to analyze and resolve the issue. If possible, the issue is resolved automatically by an appropriate corrective action. If this is not possible, it becomes a problem to be managed. A responsible natural person is associated with the problem. The responsible person analyzes the problem, resolves it and documents and/or automates the resolution.

You can summarize the benefits of SAP Cloud ALM for Operations as follows

SAP Cloud ALM empowers customers to understand health of SAP business solutions:

• Provides full stack monitoring and alerting covering business processes, integration, users, applications, and health of cloud services and systems
• Allows to conduct root cause analysis on different levels
• Acts as collaboration platform between LOB and IT
• SAP Cloud ALM enables operations automation by integrating existing automation solutions
• SAP Cloud ALM introduces intelligent event processing to enable event correlation and intelligent alerting
• SAP Cloud ALM provides transparency regarding availability of business services including event calendar and service level management

Integration & Exception Monitoring capabilities within SAP Cloud ALM provides customers with the following key capabilities

End-to-End monitoring by correlating single messages to end-to-end message flows across cloud services and systems

• Monitoring of integration related exceptions
• Support of peer-to-peer interfaces as well as orchestrated integration

Supports efficient problem resolution process and collaboration between business and IT:

• Monitoring to visualize current integration status
• Alerting to inform responsible persons in business and IT
• Search and track to identify business driven problems
• Analytics to analyze identified critical issues
• Operation automation to trigger corrective activities

Configuration Steps:

The process can be broadly divided into two steps

• Set Up Application Monitoring for SAP S/4HANA Cloud
• Configure Data Collection and Alerting

We will now go into the details of the above steps

Step 1: Set Up Application Monitoring for SAP S/4HANA Cloud

Prerequisites

• SAP Cloud ALM service key has been downloaded and is available (see below).
• You need a user with the role SAP_BR_ADMINISTRATOR in the SAP S/4HANA Cloud tenant.

Download SAP Cloud ALM Service key

• You will need space developer access in the sub account containing the SAP Cloud ALM tenant to download the Service key.
• Login to the SAP BTP administration Cockpit and navigate to the subaccount and further go into the space containing the SAP Cloud ALM instance
• In the navigation panel, choose Services > Instances and Subscriptions.

• Go to the SAP Cloud ALM API instance (create one if it does not exist) and click on create service key. Provide a service key name and create the service key.

• Download the service key as shown below. Certain parameters within the key will be used later during the setup of monitoring.

Now we move onto step two of the process

Application Monitoring for SAP S/4HANA Cloud

• You need a user with the role SAP_BR_ADMINISTRATOR in the SAP S/4HANA Cloud tenant.
• Log on to your SAP S/4HANA Cloud tenant
• Navigate to the Communication Management group and select the Communication Systems tile

• Click the “New” button the create a new communication system
• Provide a name for the communication system and click on create.

In the field host name, provide the value of the parameter API from the SAP Cloud ALM service key you had downloaded in Step 1. Leave the value of field Port at 443

• Go to the section OAuth2.0 Settings and add the value from the parameter “URL” in the service key.
  • Remove the leading https://
  • Add the extension /oauth/token at the end

• Go to section Users for Outbound Communication. Click on New User.
  • Switch Authentication Method to OAuth2.0
  • Provide the values “Clientid” and “Clientsecret” from the downloaded service key.
  • Click on create

• Save the communication system.
• Next, Create a communications arrangement but clicking on the communications arrangement app and creating a new arrangement

• Choose Scenario SAP_COM_0527 and provide a meaningful description and click create

• In the field communications systems, enter the communication system that you created before

• Select the monitoring values that you want to enable. (Integration & Exception Monitoring is mandatory for our purposes)

• Got the section Outbound Services and in the SAP Cloud ALM for Operations – Scheduler section, in the Field “Path”: Enter ‘/’ and press enter. This will populate the URL from the service key entries provided in the Communications system arrangement.

• Schedule the data collection job to run every 1 minute and save the Communication Arrangement

Step 2: Configure Data Collection and Alerting

• Login to your SAP Cloud ALM tenant
  • You need one of the following the SAP Cloud ALM roles
    • Integration Architect
    • Integration Owner
    • Global Administrator
  • Go to the Integration & Exception Monitoring application from the launchpad

• Click on the Scope selection button (bullseye) and select the SAP S/4HANA Cloud systems that you want to monitor

• Click on the configuration (rack-wheel) icon on the top right and make sure the toggle for the systems you have selected is set to on.

• When there are Alerts or Exceptions are generated during the EXPORT, IMPORT or FORWARD operations of a Transport Request (as mentioned below), they will show up in the Integration & Exception monitoring App

Overview of the Alerts and Exceptions generated:

Detailed View:

• You can also generate Email Notifications of these alerts by adding yourself as a recipient in the Notification Management App

• Afterwards go to Configuration settings from within the Integration & Exception monitoring App. Select the system you would like to monitor the Alerts from and go to the Events Tab

• Make sure have an Event being generated for Erroneous Extensibility Transports.

• Add your email to in the recipient section of the event settings to receive Alert Notifications.

The Email Alert is generated every time an Alert or Exception is triggered on the SAP S/4HANA Cloud System.

The SAP S/4HANA Cloud specific configuration has to be repeated for all tenants in your landscape.

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