One of the most annoying activities in SAP BI/BW systems is connected with Process Chains Monitoring: how much time do you spend each day to check if everything has gone fine? Typically, every morning, somebody has to control all Process Chains executions occurred during night. And what about if the system itself called you to say: "hey guy, something didn't work with the Process Chain XYZ" with an e-mail? That's why we say "start Passive Monitoring".
There are two main ways to gather the result: the first one is to use transaction RSPCM - "Monitor Daily process Chain" to put the relevant Process Chains under control. If a Process Chain will fail you will be alerted with a message (e.g. via e-mail): how many times did you use it? To tell the truth, in my experience, introducing this transaction is like discovering the wheel!
There's another solution, even simpler, that provides answers to other questions as: "how can I be sure that the Process Chain has completed successfully?".
You must simply define two messages at the end of the Process Chain:
- Successful termination
- Bad termination
I think the traffic light colour is clear to everybody ...
When I open up my PC one of these two messages has to be in the Inbox folder: either the first or the second. If none of these is there I get worried about ... Consider also the benefit of informing, at the same, automatically, the information consumer that data are ready and updated, your End-User!
I know there are other solutions, as creating an ALERTs, but sometimes such innovations seems to be too expensive in terms of learning. In most cases who cares of CCMS doesn't know what has to be done in case of bad termination.
According to me KISS principle (Keep It Simple and Small), sometimes can really help. "Passive Monitoring" can be a starting point to introduce further Monitoring options, is cheap (requires only SCOT configuration) and gets in touch with you with your e-mail address: I think that most of you will check you e-mail accounts even more than ten times a day!
