Monitoring with AIF and signing off the fix

BD87 and WE02 are tools for integration specialists. In production, the people who own the business data, such as Ana in accounts payable or Maria in order-to-cash, need to see the errors that are theirs to fix, in business terms, without learning IDoc status codes. That is what SAP Application Interface Framework (AIF) adds on top of the IDoc layer.

What AIF adds to IDoc monitoring

AIF is part of SAP S/4HANA itself (no separate add-on installation); check your license agreement for the scope of use with custom interfaces. For IDocs, AIF does not replace the IDoc framework: the IDoc is still created, processed and given statuses as before. AIF registers the IDoc interface, indexes messages by business keys such as the PO number or supplier, routes errors to recipients (groups of responsible users), and gives them a monitor where they see the error, its business context and allowed actions.

Setting up an IDoc interface in AIF

1. In /AIF/CUST, define a namespace for the interfaces, for example CMC_EDI.
2. Run the IDoc structure generator /AIF/IDOC_GEN with the basic type, message type and extension; it generates the structure and can create the interface definition (for example interface INVOIC_IN, version 1).
3. Choose an IDoc processing scenario so the ALE runtime processes the IDoc and AIF writes its application log.
4. Create a message index table as a copy of /AIF/STD_IDX_TBL and add the key fields people search by, then assign it in the interface-specific settings.
5. Define recipients for the namespace, assign them to the interface, and assign users to recipients with /AIF/RECIPIENTS.
6. Test with WE19 in CMQ and check the result in the Interface Monitor /AIF/IFMON and in Monitoring and Error Handling /AIF/ERR.

In the SAP Fiori launchpad, business users such as Ana work in the Message Dashboard, the web UI of AIF's monitoring (a Web Dynpro app, not an F-numbered Fiori app), which shows only the messages of the recipients they are assigned to; from SAP S/4HANA 2021, Message Monitoring for Integration Experts gives specialists more technical detail. Integration specialists keep BD87 and WE02 for technical work, and SAP Cloud ALM's Integration and Exception Monitoring can collect IDoc and AIF message data from SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, filtered by message type and status, for alerting across systems.

Documenting an IDoc incident so it can be signed off

An IDoc incident is closed when the business process is whole again, not when the status turns green. Contoso uses one incident record format for every interface error in hypercare, and Priya's team will not sign off a fix that lacks any of these fields.