Technical Articles
Introducing automatic expert-level analysis of your support files (Pilot in BI)
We’ve heard from you — our customers and partners — and you want more power in identifying and resolving issues on your schedule and at your speed. We are introducing a new tool that will empower you to automate and expedite a core aspect of incident resolution — File analysis.
The tool is called the Support Log Assistant and it’s available for our Business Intelligence Platform customers today!
SAP Product Support deals with a lot of different types of files when supporting our customers. These files could be log, trace, configuration or really any type of text file that contains useful information for troubleshooting and diagnostics.
Currently, customers and partners attach these files to a support incident at the request of the SAP Product Support engineer that is working with them on the issue. The engineer then analyzes these files and looks for known issues or clues as to what could be causing the issue.
This works well today and with the introduction of the Support Log Assistant tool, we can make this process automated and available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for our customers.
The Support Log Assistant works by using the end users browser to scan the selected files for known issues, interesting entries or other important details that can help identify problems. These are presented as alerts, along with proposed solutions, and a detailed Analysis Report is also generated as a summary of the scan results.
Check out the video below for demo of the tool in action
The Support Log Assistant empowers you to automate issue resolution and speed up the analysis of your support related files. As of March 20th, 2019, the Support Log Assistant can detect over 110 different file types and will detect over 200 analysis objects. SAP Product Support is committed to growing these numbers daily and expanding the product areas that are covered by this tool.
The Support Log Assistant is available today with a controlled roll-out for our Business Intelligence Platform customers. The tool is free and can be found here:
Support Log Assistant – Pilot Tool
There is also a Wiki site that covers the basics of this tool here:
Support Log Assistant – Wiki / Documentation
Try it today and make sure we hear from you! Share your feedback.
Thanks,
Jonathan
Product Owner – Support Log Assistant
Feedback, Comments & Questions e-mail: ps_dp_tools@sap.com
very interesting and helpful tool
Q: Do you plan to have a stand-alone version of these tools for installation in a local customer environment?
For security reasons, many customers do not want log files to be released from the company, or when out, without much information that will lead to a wrong analysis of the log files.
Ayman
Great question Ayman,
I didn't get into in this article but we built this tool in such a way that you don't actually send anything to SAP. It works the other way around and we send a (json) file to your browser and we use your browser to scan the contents of the files and display any matches for known issues. It isn't until the end where you are given a choice to zip up your files, and the report generated during your session, to SAP for further assistance via the regular channels, Chat, incident, etc...
We could certainly look to package this up as an application available to run on customer's side though. It is essentially just a database driven javascript application.
Thanks!
Jonathan
Thank you, Jonathan, for explaining and made clear that all analysis is done in the client's side browser (not on an external server) and that the analyzed files do not leave the customer’s side.
The FAQ and others like “Adding Files to Analyze” therefore need to be fixed, as many of them talked about uploading to the tool, which has me and other people confused, I think.
I look forward to seeing the tool as an application that can be run on the client side
Ayman
good catch. I had our technical writer update the FAQ and Wiki. Thanks!
Looks interresting - but it is not working with IE 11... so at first I was disappointed that "nothing" happens.. IE is still companies default browser so every web-link is opened there... and I fell for it...
But with Chrome it did a good Job! I had some Automation Framework log files - still not recognized - but that maybe coming in the near future I hope!
Go On!
Wobi
Thanks Wolfgang. We fixed the IE issue and hope to roll out the fix tomorrow or Friday. Appreciate the feedback.
Good stuff JB. I'll make sure are team knows about this.
Thanks
BW