Technical Articles
SAP Automation Pilot 101 – Managing your HANA Cloud Instances via Automation Pilot
What are you going to learn?
In the series “SAP Cloud Platform Automation Pilot 101,” we will explore this brand new service. We are going to start with this general article and continue to deep-dive into the service details. We will learn more about how to automate your repetitive DevOps work on top of the SAP Cloud Platform without effort.
In this blog post, we will explore the Automation Pilot capabilities for managing the HANA Cloud. And how you can easily execute lifecycle management steps for your HANA Cloud instance.
Automation Pilot and HANA Cloud
Automation Pilot provides a special HANA Cloud catalog with a set of predefined. Automation content for your HANA Cloud instance. Note that this is not final content, and we will extend it based on your feedback, so you are welcome to give it.
To locate the commands, you can simply filter them out by name in the Commands section of Automation Pilot.
As you can see, currently, we provide lifecycle management operations on top of your HANA Cloud instance. We are also working on scenarios for polling monitoring data.
How can I use those?
Let’s have a look at a particular scenario.
This is a straightforward two-step scenario of restarting a HANA cloud instance. Of course, this scenario can be executed via the command line; however, this brings with it a couple of downsides:
- We have to maintain a script which consists of two commands (this script might grow in more complex scenarios)
- We have to maintain a JSON input for each and every HANA instance that we have. So if we have to operate multiple instances in multiple locations, this can become a pain.
- Whenever a new REST API is introduced, we should adapt our scripts.
- We should use another system or a cron job for scheduling the execution of those.
All of those can be easily eliminated with Automation Pilot.
To easily test the scenario, do the following.
- Locate the RestartHANACloudInsatnce command.
- Hit the Trigger button.
- Fill your instance information – resource name, region.
- Add your user/password or refreshToken
- Hit the Trigger button.
Once you get used to the command’s usage and understand how they work, you can easily extract the required inputs into the Inputs section so you can re-use them and not enter them every time.
As a next step, you can try out to schedule the execution instead of manually triggering. And to make it more complex, if you have multiple HANAs, you can easily make this a mass operation on all or a subset of them.
What’s next?
- Explore the Automation Pilot HANA Cloud catalog and set up your automation scenarios. Feel free to get in touch and give us feedback.
- Explore the additional blog posts right here
Hi Kiril,
We'd like to automatically stop our HANA Cloud instances in the integration and validation environments when they are not in use and then restart them automatically when we need them. Is there a way to achieve this with the this solution (or using other tools)?
Thanks,
Pierre
Dear Pierre,
thank you for getting in touch.
I can think of a couple of ways of achieving this with Automation Pilot:
If you need a meeting to elaborate more on that just drop me an email to k.gavrailov at sap dot com and we will discuss it.
Thanks,
Kiril
Automation Pilot looks great. I have been testing it out for starting and stopping Hana Cloud instances.
Can you tell me though how this compares to the SAP CP Job Scheduler service. Is it intended that Automation Pilot will replace the Job Scheduler? Or is job scheduler more for when you need code scheduled to run in an application that you are developing; whereas Automation Pilot is more devops related?
Dear Jason,
thanks for the comment and the question.
Automation Pilot is in no way intended to replace the Job Scheduler service. The main purpose of the Automation Pilot is entirely on DevOps scenarios and achieving them with low/no-code way. The Job Scheduler is more related, exactly as you have described, to extend your application functionality.
In case you have more questions don't hesitate to get in touch.
Thanks,
Kiril
Have setup a scheduled execution to turn a HANA Cloud instance off each day however I occasionally get a failure with no information why it failed:
How are we supposed to debug these? The link for the "actions" log just shows an empty screen. What sort of things could cause the shutdown of a hana cloud instance to fail?
Should I schedule the command two or three times in a row to ensure it really gets shutdown?
Dear Jason,
thanks for getting in touch. We will very soon deliver new functionality which will allow you more detailed traces and elaborate errors in order to debug your errors. Meanwhile, I let's communicate via email to support you solve your issue.
Cheers,
Kiril
Hello all,
SAP Automation Pilot now offers detailed execution logs that can be enabled for debug reasons. Note: This is still a Beta feature and might not work as expected in all cases. You can check the documentation for more details.
Kind regards,
-Teodor
is this service available for SAP BTP trial account also? I am not able to find it, unfortunately.
Hi! Automation Pilot is now available on trial in the Singapore region (cf-ap21)
Add your user/password or refreshToken Is this referring to my BTP username/pwd, my i-number/ and pwd? Is there a way to create a username/pwd just for Automation Pilot? I don't want to put my i-number/pwd as the Subaccount and Automation pilot is accessible to my whole team?
Hello,
We are expecting a user/password or refresh token for a user that has permissions to operate the HANA Cloud instance, you are in control of these users in the BTP cockpit.
You can setup a dedicated technical user and then add the required permissions in order to use it instead of your I user.
In case you are using your personal user and you have multi factor authentication enabled you need to append the OTP to the end of your password when passing it to the input.
Kind regards,
Teodor