Tool Access

Task Areas

• Administration

  Setting up of the various tools for Process Integration, system monitoring, and user management. An administrator must be involved in the installation process. For more information, see the Installation Guide on SAP Service Marketplace.

• Technical Configuration

  Contains the configuration of the runtime components. It includes setting up the Integration Engine, the Advanced Adapter Engine, and the adapters. This configuration depends on the components implemented in the existing system landscape; the components can be configured independently of the design and configuration of the collaborative process by consultants, administrators, or both.

• Design

  This area covers the design and modelling of cross-component processes by a development or consultant team. This involves the maintenance of all information required for the integration of the applications (process model, interfaces, mapping). Together, these objects are referred to as Enterprise Services Repository Content or integration content .

• Configuration

  This area covers the configuration of cross-component processes by a development or consultant team. Inbound and outbound processing, routing, and mapping are all configured for a particular configuration scenario and a specific system landscape. This task area also includes the maintenance of configuration data for the IDoc adapter.

• Monitoring

  Includes the monitoring of distributed processes at runtime. This includes monitoring of the message flow (with respect to throughput, for example), and analysis and further processing of messages that have not been processed (status tracking). The monitoring of processed IDocs and RFCs in the corresponding adapters also belongs to the monitoring task area.

The transition from technical configuration (an administrative task) to the configuration of the process is continuous. For example, the IDoc adapter must access metadata that describes the structure of an IDoc. Which IDocs are to be processed depends on the cross-component process (configuration). In order to access the metadata of an IDoc, there must be an RFC connection to the system that will send or receive the IDocs (technical configuration). The latter task is likely to fall to an administrator, the former to a consultant.

User Roles

To access the functions of SAP NetWeaver PI, you require the authorizations that are connected to the user roles. They roughly correspond to the task areas described above.

More information: Dialog Users (AS ABAP)

Accessing Tools

The tools for SAP NetWeaver PI are implemented both as ABAP transactions and Java applications.

• SAP systems based on SAP Web AS 6.40 or higher provide ABAP transactions for the configuration of the Integration Engine and the IDoc adapter, for the generation of ABAP proxies, and for monitoring. When users who have been assigned one of the roles specified above log on to an SAP system of this type, they can use their personal user menu to access the transactions they require.

• The Java part is accessed from a start page. You can access this start page from the respective user menu, from the area menu, and from certain ABAP transactions (Start Integration Builder). Alternatively, you can access it directly by calling transaction SXMB_IFR.

SAP NetWeaver PI Start Page

In addition to the Enterprise Services (ES) Builder and the Integration Builder you can also call the tools for Administration and Monitoring and the System Landscape Directory (see also Tasks in the System Landscape Directory) from the start page.

Single Sign-On

You can configure SAP NetWeaver PI in such a way that you can call the ES Builder, Integration Builder, the System Landscape Directory, and the Runtime Workbench using Single Sign-On. If you use Single Sign-On, you only need to enter your user and password once. You can then open all other tools without having to authenticate yourself.