Using Chrome Developer tools to troubleshoot SAP Analytics Cloud Live connections

Many times when you are setting up live connectivity between SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) and an on premise hana or BW system, you will get a generic ‘failed to connect to system’ error when attempting to create the connection. To get the actual error message or problem, use Chrome developer tools.

I’m going to give these steps for live BW but live HANA is similar.

The first step in troubleshooting this is to understand the network traffic between the browser and the BW system.

First, see if you can access the ina service on BW.

Paste this into your browser:

https://<bw IP>:<https port>/sap/bw/ina/auth?sap-client=001

If you are using a self-signed certificate you may see this:

Self signed certificates are very common when we are using test or POC systems

You will need to click advanced and then click ‘proceed to <system>’

This is a security feature of the browser and you will need to do that at the start of your session when using self signed certificates

Log onto Analytics cloud, go to the connections area and load Chrome developer tools With Ctrl + Shift + I

Then click on the network tab

Create the new connection

Enter the BW details and click OK

Look for red lines in the network trace. Typically I see a request to ‘GetServerInfo’ which returns an error of some type. This will help us determine what is actually wrong.