On a Saturday morning I get this call "Can you please check why these 25000 odd messages have been sent to Siebel"? Yeah, it is bad to get these calls on a weekend and worse if you have planned a movie. Working in the IT division of an organization which has went through lot of mergers and acquisitions, which has a heterogeneous and complex landscape; you will have to substantiate the domain you work in. And the Business users don’t bother about the applications used.
We have these messages going from SAP to Siebel through PI 7.1. We could find successful delivery of these messages in PI. Then Siebel had their own issues but thereafter to confirm whether the document numbers were sent across, the Business user asked for a report or confirmation from PI. Now it became our problem. There is no option but to check the document number in each payload (We do not have TREX) and 25000 is not a small figure. I really felt SAP should have provided the option of searching messages/payloads with attribute values.
Now I am here attending SAP TechEd 2010 in Bangalore. Moving around for sessions in PI 7.3, the huge offerings and improvement SAP has bought up in the middleware was visible, few below:
- Single stack
- Features of AEX
- Integration with Solution Manager
- Fault tolerance – blacklisting of suspicious messages
- Central monitoring
And among most of the new features I was more interested in the User Defined Message search (referring to the issue I have stated above). I could see that I was able to search a message/payload with a single value which is a very good feature. But search based on a range is not possible (eg: Document no: 100020 to 100025). Neither do I have the option of Wildcard search (eg: Document no: 1000*) which can return me list of messages/payloads which has those values. And when I create a new Search Criteria I have to manually type in the xPath Expression rather than having a value list. Also the Search Criteria is case sensitive. But cannot mention this as demerits because in a 2 hours hands-on session you do not have enough time to play around with the new features and I was not sure if I was missing something.
Central monitoring helps as a single point of reference when you have issues in your interface. AEX will definitely increase the performance by a good factor. And so on…….
So the new features of PI 7.3 are far ahead of 7.1 and is set to make PI far ahead in the EAI segment. To add on that we have Gartner analysis that sounds positive on PI 7.3.
