Michal’s PI tips: XPI inspector – new functions and features (graphical message flow display)

In my previous article Michal’s PI tips: XPI inspector – help OSS and yourselfI presented a new tool from SAP which seems to be very helpful for developers and for admin debugging purposes. Recenly SAP has released a new version which has some pretty amazing features like graphical message flow display for example.

List of new features/monitors include:

– XI Message

– Default Trace

– Performance Problem

– JEE Service

– JEE Application

Let’s see how some of them work in detail.

1. XI message – is a monitor which allows you to display a graphical message trace on a run interface. In case something was wrong with one of your interfaces you just need to put the message ID into the monitor and it will collect all the necessary traces for this particular message.

Put the message ID and select XI message monitor.

Now when you run the monitor within a few seconds it will show you all related information and we can see the nice graphical overview.

This is what we can get in this overview:

– Graphical representation of the end-to-end scenario (but it may not be 100% correct as it’s a new tool so some scenarios may not work)
– Message Details – similar to RWB
– Audit Logs – similar to RWB
– ABAP (IS) Traces for messages running on the ABAP stack
– All traces written in the default trace file and ABAP sys log during message processing – for correct time period
– All deployed SCA (together with their versions)
– Information about the SAP and OS Systems
– All channels involved in this XI message processing and their current configuration properties including channel monitoring logs as well

2. Default trace for time period – there is no need anymore to go to different tools (and there are many) to get all default traces and you also have a nice option to start with exact time for which you’d like to see the trace.

Specify the time and select the Defaut trace monitor.

Next you can see the trace in an HTML format.

3. Performance monitor – this function is very ofter necessary if you’re doing a very detailed problem inspection and need to know what is wrong with the system. For those kind of checks very often you need to have a thread dump so you can see what was happening with different services and applications.

Specify a correct monitor – 51 (Performance problem) and how many threads need to be collected and the internal for the dumps.

Now you need to wait for all of them to be created.

Finally you can see the result.

Important note
This intent of this article is not to show simple monitors but to increase the use of the XPI Inspector tool by the developers (not only for OSS message purposes). The more of us will start using it the easier will development look like and maybe in the future we will be able to help each other on the PI forum by posting a zip file from the XPI inspector only.

Thank you
I’d like to thank Kenny Scott for providing me with some additional details on those new monitors and Ivan Milushev for the tip.