Technical Articles
Why SAP Backbone Update May Go Wrong
Jitters
Did you receive today (2019/12/18) this e-mail with a light panic flavor too?
Wrong Belief
Probably you are an awake administrator and have already enabled SNOTE in the development system to use the new backbone and think that you don’t have to do anything else, because your EWA data are sent to your SAP Solution Manager, and there the checkbox “Send to SAP” is checked, so anything should be OK.
Obviously you notice that the stupid SAP EWA Workspace application is complaining something:
Mmmh, you scratch your head.
You go to solman_setup of your productive Solution Manager and check the systems (I take now only one as an example):
Ah, you think, the check-box is checked, so it is all OK, it must be one of zillions of false alarms you have already experienced in your long administrator life and decide to shrug yours shoulders: “So what?”
At least my colleagues, all experienced administrators, thought that way. They all thought, that it is the Solution Manager which sends the EWA data to SAP.
But it is not so.
First Reality Check
I will explain how this “Send to SAP” works and what you should do to be on the safe side.
First, log into your managed productive system and call transaction SDCCN (yes, that old stone age tool, it is still the spine of the EWA!).
If your solution tool plugins are up to date (check it with report RTCCTOOL, please), you will face a panic tab you never saw before:
You still are thinking “So what? I send the data to the solution manager, I don’t need these fancy new http connections in my managed system, I have already set them up in the SolMan and that was a hard work with tank-notes pointing to other tank-notes that I don’t want to repeat!
The Real Truth
Your thoughts are wrong!
Because the “Send to SAP” checkbox does not mean that the SolMan sends the data, but it simply adds a second task to the SDCCN of the managed system which sends the data directly to SAP:
This is wise, so the Solution Manager is not a single point of failure.
Let us look at the settings of destination system O01:
Ah, there is the “to SAP” sibling of solman_setup. And the used destination is SDCC_OSS.
If we look in SM59 at this destination we see that there still is the generic user the e-mail complains:
We begin to understand…
What to Do?
Now you have two options. You can execute with STC01 the tasklist SAP_BASIS_CONFIG_OSS_COMM (see note 2827658 “Automated Configuration of new Support Backbone Communication – Update 02”) which creates the two needed http destinations and then restart SDCCN and migrate, but this is much and hard work, and season holidays are near.
Or you create a technical communication user as described in the note 2174416 “Creation and activation of Technical Communication Users – SAP ONE Support Launchpad” and exchange the user and password in the destination SDCC_NEW, postponing the hard work to the next year.
Btw. It is wise to use a dedicated S-user for every productive system, so you avoid issues with the password (I have experienced local admins who without asking simply change the password on their own without communicating it to the other admins so that the common S-user gets locked).
Q-System
A special consideration has to be taken when you use to refresh your Quality and Test system by a database copy of the production system.
In this case you will inherit in the SDCCN of the Q-system the second EWA task of the production system. The solman_setup EWA application doesn’t see this, the “Send to SAP” checkbox will still be unchecked.
To get rid of this inherited entry you have to delete the task in SDCCN:
and then delete the RFC destination in the settings (skip the warning about SolMan as master system):
The “Migrate” tab will disappear
Conclusion
The “Send to SAP” checkbox in the EWA setup application of the SAP Solution Manager is not enough to be on the safe side. It is a common misunderstanding that with this checkbox checked it is the SAP Solution Manager who additionally sends the data to the SAP backbone.
In fact, when this checkbox is checked it is the managed system which directly sends the data to the SAP backbone and you have to act in the managed system.