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The Sign-Off Table

Lesson 1 of 5

Monitoring points

10 min

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An interface is a chain, and a message can fail at any link. When Lakeside Components says it never received purchase order 4500002210, the question is not whether the interface is broken but where in the chain the order stopped. You can only answer that quickly if you know every point where the message can be seen, and which monitor shows it.

Contoso Motor Co. runs SAP S/4HANA Private Edition (CMD, CMQ, CMP) after its conversion from ECC. At go-live its interfaces still run on SAP Process Orchestration (XP1); the Lakeside order flow moves to Cloud Integration in SAP Integration Suite in Wave 1, four to five months later, with SAP Cloud Connector between CMP and the tenant. This lesson uses the flow after that switch; on PO, the middleware monitor is the PO message monitor instead. The integration lead, Theo, keeps a monitoring map for each critical interface. This lesson builds one.

Walk the chain

  1. Business documentPO saved in CMP. Monitor: the PO's output status; was output triggered at all?
  2. S/4HANA interface layerOutbound IDoc or queued call. Monitors: IDoc lists and BD87, SMQ1, SM58, SBGRFCMON, SRT_UTIL.
  3. Cloud ConnectorThe tunnel to BTP. Monitor: the Cloud Connector's own monitoring and logs.
  4. Integration SuiteThe integration flow and any JMS queue. Monitor: message processing log, message queues.
  5. PartnerLakeside's intake. Evidence: transport acknowledgment, business acknowledgment, or the partner's own report.
Monitoring points for Contoso's outbound order to Lakeside Components, from business document to partner.
The Sign-Off Table · thesignofftable.com/academy/sap-int-205

The first point is easy to forget: the business document itself. If output determination did not trigger, there is no IDoc, no message and nothing red anywhere. Every monitor downstream is green because nothing happened. That is the most dangerous kind of interface failure, a silent one, and it is why reconciliation (lesson 4) exists.

Finding where PO 4500002210 stopped: start at the business document, because a message that was never created turns nothing red.
The Sign-Off Table · thesignofftable.com/academy/sap-int-205

Monitors inside S/4HANA

LayerMonitorWhat you learn
IDocsWE02 / WE05, BD87IDocs by status, error text, and reprocessing after a fix
Transactional RFCSM58Asynchronous calls that failed or are waiting
Queued RFCSMQ1 outbound, SMQ2 inboundQueues blocked behind a failed entry
Background RFCSBGRFCMONbgRFC units and their status
SOAP web servicesSRT_UTILWeb service error log and message monitor
OData services/IWFND/ERROR_LOGFailed Gateway calls with user and error context
SAP Application Interface Framework (AIF)/AIF/ERR (monitoring and error handling); the Message Dashboard for business users; Message Monitoring for Integration Experts (SAP S/4HANA 2021 and later)Interface messages, including AIF-enabled IDocs, in business terms, with correction and restart; users see only messages for the recipients they are assigned to

S/4HANA monitors an integration team uses. Availability depends on release, setup and authorizations.

Monitors outside S/4HANA

In Integration Suite, the Monitor area shows the message processing log per flow, deployed content, message queues and data stores. Cloud Connector has its own monitoring of connections and requests, which Sam's Basis team watches. At the partner, the evidence is an acknowledgment: an AS2 receipt that the file arrived, a functional acknowledgment that it parsed, an order confirmation that it was accepted. Agree with each partner which acknowledgment you get and how failures are reported back.

Three levels of partner evidence: the file arrived, it parsed, and the business accepted it; agree with each partner which ones you get.
The Sign-Off Table · thesignofftable.com/academy/sap-int-205

Above all of these, SAP Cloud ALM's Integration and Exception Monitoring collects messages and exceptions from SAP Integration Suite and connected systems, correlates single messages into end-to-end flows, and lets users search by business attributes such as an order number. SAP describes it as a way for business users and IT to share one view of data exchange problems. Contoso's S/4HANA program already runs in SAP Cloud ALM, so it is the natural home for the cross-system view.

Cross-system viewSAP Cloud ALM Integration and Exception Monitoring: correlated flows, search by business key, alerts
Middleware viewIntegration Suite message processing logs, JMS queues, data stores
Connectivity viewCloud Connector connections and logs
Application viewIDoc, queue, web service, Gateway and AIF monitors in CMP
Business viewThe document itself: output status, follow-on documents, partner confirmations
Monitoring layers for one interface. Diagnosis usually starts at the top and drills down.
The Sign-Off Table · thesignofftable.com/academy/sap-int-205

What would you do?

Lakeside says it never received PO 4500002210. In Integration Suite there is no message for that PO at all. Priya asks where to look next. What should Theo say?

Key points
  • Map every monitoring point from the business document to the partner's acknowledgment.
  • The quietest failure is a message never created; no monitor turns red for it.
  • Know the S/4HANA monitors: IDocs and BD87, SM58, SMQ1/SMQ2, SBGRFCMON, SRT_UTIL, the Gateway error log, AIF.
  • SAP Cloud ALM Integration and Exception Monitoring gives the correlated cross-system view.

Check your understanding · not graded

Lesson check

  1. 1. Why is the business document itself a monitoring point?

  2. 2. Which transaction shows inbound queued RFC entries blocked behind a failed one?

  3. 3. What does SAP Cloud ALM Integration and Exception Monitoring add over single monitors?

  4. 4. What evidence shows that a partner actually accepted an order?