PI monitoring enhancements in Solution Manager 7.1 SP10

Couple of weeks before we have upgraded our solution manager from SP7 to SM7.1 SP10. We were tested all the changes in our existing configurations like CCLM, TechMon, EEMon. During the testing, we found very significant changes in PI Monitoring, through this blog I would like to list down some of my findings.

UI Enhancements in the Technical setup

Improved SM 7.1 SP10 delivered new additional monitoring capabilities to monitor entire PI scenarios.

In SP10, there is no dedicated PI monitoring setup options in solman_Setup. Now all the PI scenarios completely integrated with interface and channel monitoring. It is quite significant, Now We can configure monitoring of all the interfaces channels, web service, Idoc communications, status of message flow and various PI components, message search etc on centrally at one place.

Why Integration

The main reason for Interface and PI monitoring integration would be that most of the PI monitoring scenarios lies on interface monitoring too, if both are defined in single place it helps the both business support users and application support help desk consultants.

First Look

Interface and PO Monitoring setup under solman_Setup -> technical monitoring divided to 4 major scenarios.  Now Pi monitoring is one of them.

Very first would be our usual interface monitoring which taken care of RFC communications, web services, Idocs. This is also enhanced to monitor tRFC,qFC,GW services. Second is our regular Connection monitoring which is dedicated monitoring setup for HTTP and TCP/IP RFCs. As per the latest roadmap Solution Manager – What is New Today, Planned for the Future – ASUG Webcast Part 4 document shared by Tammy that SAP has the roadmap even to integrate interface and connectivity monitor together under the tag as ICMon, we can expect this in future releases. Third one would be our previous PI monitoring which has component, message, channel monitors as same as in the previous releases without any change, message search feature also same as before. The new Message flow monitoring (MFMon) has been added now additionally, which helps monitoring of your B2B scenarios.

Central view of all monitoring under one place looks very more simple and more efficient.

New Message flow monitoring ( MFMon)

If you checked on SM 7.1 SP7, we do have message monitor and it also has some term as message flow monitor.  But this is different from the new message flow monitoring. Starting from the prerequisites and setup both are highly varied. The earlier is used just for getting the overview of message flow only between the components PI components like integration engine, adaptor engine, Proxy etc.

In SP10 PI Monitoring message monitor sub tab message flow monitor renamed to message overview monitor to avoid confusions.

The new message flow monitoring is actually for monitoring cross system message flows, this is more on business relevant. The exact use case for this new message flow monitoring could be the earlier requirement for Jonathan Ma here How to monitor sxmb_moni in the ABAP systems(business system)?

MFMon exactly fit for such B2B Scenarios. SAP strategy for Solution manager is that solman could support all the latest innovations. The original concept of MFMon is from one of the PI 7.3 innovation which is PI Integration visibility component. It is the major prerequisite for MFMon setup and moreover MFMon consumes needed monitoring data from there.  More technical details about PI integration visibility, you can refer here Integration Visibility – Administering Process Integration (PI) – SAP Library

source : SAP

Workflow Monitoring

This is solution manager support for Business process Management ( BPM ), to monitor custom process flow defined in BPM via Technical monitoring alerting framework.

I am very eager to check these new features, waiting for my PI sandbox for test drive. If any of the other experts tested these features, please comment here your feedback about these new monitoring features. Is that really fulfilling all the business requirement? How promising the message flow monitoring? please share your view.