Automating PI Interface Volumes Monitoring

Problem –

We recently faced a problem wherein a 3rd party vendor was not able to connect to our system and the communication channel showed no errors. There was no way we would have know about this issue. We also got lower than expected order volumes from some other interfaces. This had a huge business impact. To avoid this situation, we got a requirement to keep a track of current day(say if it is Monday) volumes vs average interface volume of last 12 Mondays. If the difference is beyond a threshold(say >30% difference), then we needed to take action accordingly. This interface volume comparison had to be done everyday for every interface and It involved a lot of Manual work.

Solution –

We build an ABAP report to automate the Interface volume Monitoring. We utilized the logic from an existing standard program RSXMB_REMOTE_SERVICE to build our custom tool.

The Internal table  lt_output_recs in the standard report RSXMB_REMOTE_SERVICE contains current day volume of all the interfaces.

Sample logic is given below, it can be altered based on your specific requirements –

We created an Master table to store daily interface volume. In our case, we created Z_INTVOL. Every time the program runs, it fills this master table.

The average computation logic will be as follows –

1. Pick the value of ‘sender service’,’sender interface’ and ‘receiver service’ from lt_output_recs
2. Pick the field values from Z_INTVOL table and find the ‘Message count’ for all the Mondays in the table for the interface picked in step 1 and compute average for it.
3. If  Today’s interface volume < 30% of average , send email 2 else send email 1.

Sample Email1’s and Email2’s are shown in the output below

Email3 is also generated using the values from lt_output_recs based on the selection screen inputs.

Output –

Email 1 – Triggered when the interface volumes are out of tolerance

The email contains a sheet as shown below

Email 2 – Triggered when all the interface volumes look good

Email 3 – Contains a sheet with Interface volumes of all the interfaces.

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Conclusion – This tool has been very useful for us and hence thought of sharing it. It gives a wonderful snapshot of the interface stats and alerts us if any interface volumes are out of norm for any interface.

Suggestions/comments are most welcome.