ChaRM document opens with warnings of RFC error to a system

Sometimes a ChaRM document may take a long time to open. This may be caused by a variety of issues. I’ll document the issue that I had faced, and steps taken to resolve it.

Symptom:  Change requests belonging to a single project in ChaRM was taking incredibly long time, and the ChaRM document had the error RFC to the Development system was not reachable. Every other project was working fine, and took reasonable amount of time to opened.

Troubleshooting steps:

1. Check if the system, the RFC to which is displayed in the warning, is up and available for normal use.

2. Ping the development system from desktop or another server in the network and check if that’s working fine.

3. Log into Solution Manager system. Execute transaction /nSM59. Scroll to the RFC which came in the ChaRM warning. Click on connection test. Wait till it returns the output.

4. Log into Solution Manager server. Try pinging the SAP system from Solution Manager server at operating system level. Wait till it returns the output.

5. Do a nslookup on the IP address for the system whose RFC is giving issues. Check if the IP is resolving to correct DNS names.

OS user: nslookup <IP>

For me, the RFC connection test from Solution Manager SAP level, took 292007 ms, i.e., 4.8 minutes.

The ping from OS level returned “dev.****.net is alive”.

Once the output screen came for RFC test, the next connection test took 3 ms. This vast difference in response times indicated an issue with the DNS and routing.

The nslookup revealed that the IP was resolving to 2 DNS names. Now, it’s important to note that nothing related to the DNS names or system IPs had been changed in the past year, So, why the issue came up suddenly is unclear. However, removing the DNS entry which did not match the server, helped resolve the issue. However, it took several hours because of TTL ( Time To Live) and caching.

Hopefully this helps to provide a direction for troubleshooting if such an issue is encountered.