Skip to Content
Author's profile photo Volker von Gloeden
Volker von Gloeden
July 16, 2010 4 minute read

Create your own customer-specific key figure for Business Process Monitoring within 5 minutes

When customers are implementing Business Process Monitoring in SAP Solution Manager they can usually live with 95% (or even more) of the provided standard monitoring features. But of course customers wouldn’t be customers if they weren’t looking for customer-specific requirements time and again which are not covered per default. As Johannes Fleig explained in his SDN Blog about the New Business Process Monitoring functionalities in SAP Solution Manager – Customer Exit there exists a complete customer exit framework where you can create your own key figures very flexibly and possibly with complex selection criteria. This can be usually achieved within 1-2 days.

But often the monitoring requirements (though customer-specific) are very simple, i.e. a simple select on one (often customer specific Z-)table where it should be checked if certain entries have been inserted or where it should be checked how many entries have been created during a certain time frame. For these cases you usually don’t have to work with the Customer Exit. In those cases it is usually sufficient to use the so-called  Table Entry Counter which allows a simple select on one table with five different fields for the where clause. The implementation shouldn’t take you much longer than 5 minutes!

 

Simple example for the Table Entry Counter

Let’s take a very simple (perhaps also artificial) example to give you an idea what can be achieved with the Table Entry Counter. We want to monitor how many sending errors we had yesterday by using SAP Connect (transaction SCOT).

In a first step you access the service session for Setup Business Process Monitoring as always. You select the business process and the business process step where you want the new key figure be assigned to. Then you select the Monitoring Type Application Monitor: Cross Application.

Setup 1

You save and navigate to the new tree branch. There you select the Monitor Name Table Entry Counter (BOTABCNT) via F4 value help and give it a speaking name (here: SAP Connect errors). You select the monitor, save the new settings and navigate to the new tree branch.

Setup 2

Here you can choose from two possible key figures:

– “Number of Counted Entries” (with given filter criteria)

– “Number of Distinct Values” (on single field name and with given filter criteria)

 

For our purposes we select the first key figure Number of Counted Entries.

Setup 3

Then we navigate to tab strip Detail Information where we double-click on the Counter field 001. A pop-up window opens where we can specify the table we want to select from (here: SOES – SAPoffice: External send operation) and we specify the table fields with the respective value that we want to use for the where clause. Customers of require dynamic selections when it comes to dates. This is also possible with the right usage of key words (here: we want to select always from the previous day and hence specify $TODAY-1)

Setup4

Then we navigate to tab strip Monitoring Schedule in order to specify when the data collection should take place (here: we want to monitor every working day. As we want to collect 15 minutes past midnight and collect from the previous day we have to specify Tuesday to Saturday and not Monday to Friday).

Setup 5

As a last step you Generate and Activate the new monitoring customizing as always. Then you are all set and you created your new key figure in 5 minutes. Plus the 10 minutes reading now of course. But creating a new key figure within 15 minutes in total is still not bad, isn’t it? You can use a coffee break for it….

More  technical details about this Table Entry Counter and more available key words for dynamic date selection are described in the Setup Guide for Table Entry Counter under http://service.sap.com/bpm > Media Library > Technical Information or directly here http://service.sap.com/~sapdownload/011000358700000767792010E

 

 

Frequently Asked Questions about Business Process Monitoring are answered under http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/SM/FAQ+Business+Process+Monitoring.

 

The previous blogs provide further details about Business Process Monitoring functionalities within the SAP Solution Manager.

Assigned Tags

      3 Comments
      You must be Logged on to comment or reply to a post.
      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      Hello,

      I have two questions regarding this feature, first of all is it possible to get the table entry counter with Business Process Analytics ?

      Then, I would like to know the different between Table Entry Counter and Generic Table Entry Counter for remote DB  (please see below)?

      table counter.png

      Thanks in advance.

      Elsa.

      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      Hello Elsa,

      thanks for your questions. Here's some feedback:

      - Currently there are no plans to enable the Table Entry Counter for BP Analytics. But your input is very welcome, and this request will be forwarded to the reponsible developer.

      - From a functional point of view, the Table Entry Counter for Remote DB offers the same possibilities as the "standard" Table Entry Counter (in terms of key figures, available parameters etc.). The main difference is that this Table Entry Counter for Remote DB is able to connect to any SAP-supported database. Hence it's main purpose is to monitor tables in a database of a non-SAP system which is part of your solution landscape. Such kind of databases can't be accessed in a way it's usually done in an SAP environment (by calling the remote system via RFC), but must be handled differently. The remote DB access is then done via ADBC interface. You can find further details on this kind of monitoring in the "Setup Guide - Non-SAP (non-ABAP) Monitoring" available at SAP Service Marketplace, alias BPM: www.service.sap.com/bpm -> Media Library -> Technical Information.

      The conclusion is: if you simply like to monitor an SAP system, please use the standard Table Entry Counter. Only if a non-SAP system is addressed the Table Entry Counter for Remote DB comes into play.

      Best regards,

      Johannes Fleig

      SAP AGS Dev Support

      Author's profile photo Former Member
      Former Member

      Thanks Johannes for this answer it's all clear now.

      Nevertheless as you said, I think that the Table Entry Counter could be very useful for clients using Business Process Analytics especially when they want to analyze domains that are not covered by standards key figures.

      Best Regards,

      Elsa.