Highlights on SAP PI 7.3 New features
During the SAP TechEd 2010 in Berlin new features regarding SAP PI 7.3 were presented. Some keywords are: single Java Stack, central monitoring, IDOC_AAE and HTTP_AAE.
SAP is moving towards losing the ABAP stack. With the new SAP PI 7.3 version it's still possible to have a dual stack (ABAP and JAVA) but the big change is the single JAVA stack.
Single JAVA stack
What are the main changes towards the single JAVA stack. With only having a JAVA stack it will reduce the total costs of operation:
- Installation of PI7.3 with a JAVA stack only can be done within 1 hour instead of the 2 to 3 hours.
- The re-start time of PI7.3 can be done in 90 seconds instead of 2 to 3 hours.
- New packages can be installed within 5 minutes.
The above points are hardware depended and with the same hardware used you will gain approximate 50% of your time.
When moving to a Java stack only you will lose the ccBPM as this is part of the ABAP stack. A successor of ccBPM is in development and will be called BPMN. BMPN will contain the same features as ccBPM and will be graphically presented but in another way. It gives a better overview of the interaction of the Sender and Receiver messages, it's much better presented.
In PI7.3 new adapters are added based on already existing ones. In any other PI system prior to 7.3 the HTPP and IDOC adapters are running via the ABAP stack. So basically this means you have to do monitoring on the ABAP and JAVA stack. With the new version of PI the HTTP and IDOC adapter are being moved to the JAVA stack and will be called HTTP_AAE and IDOC_AAE. AAE stands for Advanced Adapter Engine. The extra features for these adapters are the usage of adapter modules. The HTTP_AAE adapter also will be supporting a new message protocol which is the GET option, so POST and GET is possible for HTTP_AAE.
Monitoring
Regarding monitoring in SAP PI7.3 we will now be able to centrally monitor multiple PI domains. Central monitoring is done via Solution Manager 7.1. The mean reasons to have a central monitoring tool with Solution manger are:
- Growing PI landscape complexity and distribution leads to growing requirements towards a central monitoring approach.
- Reduce the TCO by simplification of the operations processes e.g. providing one central entry point combining monitors for PI overall status with drill-down options up to host level.
Reduce the time for:
- System checks
- Handover procedures
- From incident detections to root cause
Enable tight integration with:
- System Monitoring and Root Cause Analysis
- Alerting Infrastructure
- Notification-/ Incident Management
- Relieve productive systems from individual monitoring activities by a central collection of monitoring data.
When starting Solution Manager 7.1 with transaction SM_WORKCENTER, you can choose one of your PI domains and you will be redirected to a "good morning" screen. This "good morning" screen will give an Overview of:
- Integration Server
- Decentral adapter engines
- Business Systems (= ABAP Proxies)
For all 3 above it will show the number of Alerts, the availability and the status of the self test. It also shows the number of messages in error and in backlog.
When clicking the Integration Server it will show the status of:
ABAP Stack
Java Stack
- Adapter Engine
- Mapping runtime
- Directory
- Repository
- SLD
All of the above will have the number of alerts, availability status and the status of the self test. For the Integration Engine and the Adapter engine it also shows the number of messages in error and the number of message in the backlog. When clicking on one of the options it will show a detailed error. Based on this error it's possible to send out a notification via e-mail and/or an alert via e-mail or sms.
Central and local monitoring
For both the central and local monitoring a nice feature is added and this is regarding payload based message searching. The user can define fields and values to search on and then the messages and interfaces are shown which match the criteria.
Timelines
For PI7.3 the ramp-up is scheduled in Q4 2010 and will be finished in Q2 2011. For the Solution Manager 7.1 there is also a ramp-up which is scheduled to be finished in Q3. So there is an overlap in time line.
Some other timelines for standard maintenance:
- XI3.0 March 2010 (+3 years extended maintenance)
- PI 7.0 and 7.1x Dec 2015 (+2 years extended maintenance)
- PI7.3 Dec 2017 (+2 years extended maintenance)
Other features
A lot of new features were mentioned at the SAP TechEd and I have grouped them here:
- Pinging adapters, to see if they are still running
- Unlimited size of binary file-to-file transfer, no mapping can be done as this will not be loaded in the memory, just for copying/moving big files from one place to another.
- SAP PI 7.3 can come als in an Eclipse version.
- User context menu, only the objects which an admin specifies will be shown in the ESR, adding of a user workplace, which refers to the objects a user, has been working on.
- Blacklisting of messages, when messages run into error and after 2 times passing by the integration engine it will be flagged and moved to another queue. This will prevent messages to get stuck in queues. An administrator can cancel or even restart the message.
- New XI protocol, XI3.1 protocol, the main difference is that instead of sending back an HTTP 200 response it will send back a HTTP202 response, which is a much smaller message and this will give some better performance.
For me it was a real eye opener and my personal opinion is that SAP is going to deliver a good product with SAP PI7.3
Feel free to react on this blog!
Best regards,
Guido Koopmann
