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Function documentationMessage Flow Monitoring

 

In an SAP Process Integration (PI) landscape, Message Flow Monitoring (MFMon) monitors the status of business-critical message-based transactions, centrally. You can monitor

  • Application-to-application (A2A) message flows within your PI system landscape

  • Business-to-Business (B2B) message flows between systems of your organization and PI systems of your business partners.

Message Flow Monitoring covers the following use cases:

  • As a business power user, you can check the status of B2B or A2A processes without needing to access a PI system. You can, for example,

    • verify that an order was received by your business partner

    • check whether the confirmation of the order was sent from the business partner’s system back to your system

    • if an error occurred, send a notification to the application supporter responsible

  • As an application supporter you monitor the message flows, for example, to identify the root cause of failed message flow instances and resolve issues (correct an incorrect mapping value, for example).

Message Flow Monitoring is an interface between

  • the view of business power users who think in terms of, for example, order numbers or IDoc IDs

– and –

  • the technical view of application supporters who think in terms of technical systems (middleware components)

Integration

Message Flow Monitoring

  • uses information provided by the Integration Visibility Component of SAP Process Integration.

  • is in the SAP Solution Manager System & Application Monitoring work center.

Prerequisites

You have

  • SAP Process Integration 7.31 SP07 or higher

  • SAP Solution Manager 7.1 SP09 or higher

Features

The application consists of two tab pages.

  • Overview: The Overview tab page has three main sections. They are as follows:

    • Status Overview: In this section, you can do the following:

      • View the total number of flow groups that are selected for monitoring.

      • View the number of flow instances in various statuses for the selected flows. The statuses are Error, Scheduled, Cancel, In Process, and Successful.

      • Navigate to the Message Flow tab page by clicking any status tile and view the details accordingly.

    • Application Overview: In this section, you can do the following:

      • View the list of flow groups that are selected for monitoring.

      • View the flows that are part of a flow group by expanding the flow group node.

      • View the details either in a graphical format or a tabular format. The details include the number of instances and alerts in each flow group and flow along with the statuses. The statues are Error, Scheduled, In Process, Cancelled and Successful.

    • Alert ticker: You can view the total number of alerts with red and yellow ratings raised for the monitored message flows. Clicking the alert opens the Alert Inbox in a separate window. The top five recently occurred alerts are shown in the Alert Ticker that has red or yellow rating.

  • Message Flows: On the Message Flow tab page, you can do the following:

    • View the Message Flow table with details like Status, Flow Name, Start Date and Start Time. You can personalize the table by selecting columns that you want to be displayed on the table.

    • Use the Advanced Search criteria to search for data according to your requirement. You can also save your search criteria and mark it as default for future use.

    • Click any message flow to view further details that include information on the flow track, related flows, business attributes (Payload and EDI attributes) and general information like flow group candidates and involved interfaces.

Other features are as follows:

  • Personalization: You can personalize the view of Message Flow monitoring by adding tabs. You can drag and drop the required view on the screen and a new tab gets added. You can rename, hide, copy, or delete the newly added tab.

  • Incident and Notifications: You can create incidents for support, or send an e-mail or SMS to system users, business partners, or external recipients.

  • Scope Selection and Auto-refresh: You can select a single message flow or multiple message flows to monitor. You can set auto-refresh, and the details will be refreshed at the specified interval. You can also pause and restart the refresh.

Activities

The following roles and activities can be involved in the conception and implementation of Message Flow Monitoring scenarios:

  1. Application supporters and business power users identify relevant (the most business-critical, for example) business transactions they support or own (sending purchase orders and receiving order confirmations, for example).

  2. The solution architect conceives the monitoring views and the corresponding roles and users.

  3. The integration architect

    • identifies the message flows which correspond to the business transactions to be monitored.

    • if applicable: defines mapping rules for related message flows, such as purchase order and order confirmation (the attribute Order of the order message flow is to be mapped to the attribute Order no. of the order confirmation message flow, for example).

      Note Note

      To match varying number formats (“Order 123”in one system is “Order 00123” in the other system, for example), the Integration Architect can create a custom BAdI implementation (enhancement spot E2EEM_RELATED_FLOW_CALCULATOR).

      End of the note.

  4. The system administrator

    • sets up message flow scenarios

    • implements the mapping rules for related message flows

    • assigns process supporters as contact persons

    • creates personal object worklists (POWL) and the corresponding roles and users, and assigns them to message flow groups.

    For more information, see Setting up Message Flow Monitoring.

  5. The business power user checks the status of a business transaction. If an error occurs, the business power user notifies the application supporter. For more information, see Checking the Status of a Business Transaction.

  6. The application supporter identifies failed transactions and the root cause of errors. For more information, see Monitoring Message Flows and Handling Errors.

  7. The system administrator runs and manages the monitoring solution. If, for example, PI integration scenarios were changed, or new message flows were added, the time stamp of the data collection runs can be checked, to verify that the data extractors are running correctly.