SAP End-To-End Exception Management
In today’s business scenarios, processes are often distributed cross-system and over multiple application components. Thereby customers use SAP components in combination with
self-developed and legacy components which are based on Non-SAP Technologies. SAP
Exception Management includes the pro-active monitoring of mission critical components
that are required for a smooth and reliable flow of the core business processes in heterogeneous cross-technology landscapes. In addition, it provides tools for deeper error analysis, processing and documentation.
More and more SAP customers operate today
in complex heterogeneous IT-landscapes with
business processes distributed over multiple
application components. Typically, in such
environments, orchestration of business processes is also distributed over multiple components, which then are also based on SAP as
well as Non-SAP components. Thus, usually a
central End-To-End Modeling of Business Processes is not available.
In case of an exception within a process flow,
i.e. in case of an error or interruption, a corrective action or a check of the corresponding
processing steps and/or business objects is
necessary. End-To-End Exception Management provides tools for pro-active monitoring
of instrumented mission critical processes,
components and/or interfaces regarding exceptions, performance and completeness. In
addition, it provides capabilities for detail
analysis, documentation and a coupling to the
End-To-End Monitoring and Alerting Infrastructure.
Besides Monitoring of instrumented processes
and components, End-To-End Exception Management offers the capability to centrally
manage mission critical single exceptions (e.g.,
Web Service exceptions or ABAP dumps), i.e.
exceptions that happen at one location and
have only influence for this location.
SAP Exception Management is able to consume all kinds of exceptions in one central
place, making SAP Exception Management
Cockpit (SAP EMC) the central management
tool for mission critical exceptions in customer
landscapes.
Exception Monitoring
SAP Exception Management Cockpit (SAP
EMC) is the central place to monitor and analyze critical multiple step as well as single exceptions. Multiple-Step Exceptions are exceptions which happen at a specific location but
have influence on predecessor steps within
one application component/technical system.
In case of such an exception, usually different
processing steps have to be rolled back. Single
exceptions happen at one location and have
only influence for this location. This means all
predecessor steps are not influenced by the
exception.
The SAP EMC overview shows a summary of
all retrieved broken process flows and technical exceptions cross-system and crosstechnology. Exceptions are thereby distinguished by type and category and customers
have the possibility to adapt the POWL overview to their own needs. For single exceptions
the following categories are currently supported by default: ABAP Dumps, Web service
exceptions, JobLog errors, SysLog errors, AppLog errors. For each of those categories selective exception retrieval, e.g. specific user,
job name, WebService etc. is possible.
For multiple step exceptions in addition, the
different process step information are displayed, containing predecessor/successor
relationship, duration, context information as
well as executed unit calls.
By selecting a specific category all related exception instances are shown. For a specific
exception instance it is possible to
Exception Documentation and Correction
- Context sensitive Jump-in to the Guided
Procedure Browser
- Show exception details for a deeper error
analysis
- Create manually a notification which contains links to error details and related
Guided Procedures
The Authoring environment of the Guided
Procedure Framework allows customers to
define their own Guided Procedure for problem resolution and documentation via specific
automatic and/or manual activities.
Guided Procedure Framework
In addition, for multiple step exceptions, it is
possible to assign a processor as well as a processing status.
From the SAP EMC a context sensitive jump-in
to the Guided Procedures Browser is possible
and thus allows for searching related documentation and predefined solutions to deal
with the exception occurred.
Exception Analysis
Exception Alerting
Error Details
Coupling to Monitoring and Alerting Infrastructure
The error details of the selected exception
instance contain, e.g. the error messages, a
detailed error context, the call stack and the
payload of the processed unit as well as related exceptions.
Exception Management specific data provider
allow retrieval of context sensitive exceptions
metrics for Technical Monitoring via the Moni-
toring and Alerting Infrastructure. In contrast
to the standard exception metrics from system monitoring, which are mainly of statistical
nature, exception management metrics correspond to single exceptions and can be, e.g.,
specific per category and user. Thereby, the
central Exception Management store acts as a
data source. Customer specific exception metrics which are collected via the Monitoring
and Alerting Infrastructure lead to alerts in the
generic Alert Inbox. This coupling allows the
reuse of the automatic notification as well as
the incident mechanism.
SAP Exception Management Logging
SAP Exception Management Instrumentation
Platform (SAP-EM IP)
In many cases, the pre-requisite of completely
modeled business processes is not given at
customer side. Therefore, in order to enable
sufficient exception management, i.e., logging
of technical and business exceptions during
runtime, an instrumentation of critical locations in the source code is necessary. Therefore a SAP-EM Instrumentation Platform is
introduced. SAP-EM IP is based on static code
instrumentation in the ABAP case (SAP-EM
IPA) and dynamic instrumentation based on
Byte Code Injection in the Java/C# case (SAPEM IPJ). SAP EM-IPA is part of ST_PI and can
therefore be deployed independently of the
product. Here, instrumentation can be done
via implicit and/or explicit enhancement
points when enhancing the SAP coding or directly in customer coding.
By instrumentation the actual business process flow is chopped into single processing
steps. Within one process step multiple modularization unit calls (local/remote API calls) can
be execute. During runtime SAP EM-IP logging
information is optionally written to a local EM
store at the managed system and transferred
to the central exception store located in SAP
Solution Manager.
The SAP Business Passport Concept
In order to collect all logging and tracing information belonging to one process instance,
the SAP Business Passport (SAP BPP) is introduced. SAP BPP is a token used to uniquely
identify a process instance, i.e. a single execution of a certain process type. Once a Business
Process Instance ID and a Business Process
Type ID are generated and injected in the SAP
BPP, the BPP is transferred cross-system and
cross-technology from one processing step to
the successor processing step via the SAP
Passport V3 and is persisted together with the
logging and tracing information per processing
step. Besides a unique identifier, the SAP BPP
contains the predecessor/successor relationship of the instrumented Processing Steps as
well as the Business Process Type information.
Which information is to be logged?
Via the SAP-EM Instrumentation Platform all
relevant information for every critical processing step is logged in a dedicated logging
format. The logged information contains the
technical information derived from the SAP
Extended Passport, the process information
derived from SAP Business Process Passport,
processing step information including involved
modularization unit calls, exceptions messages, payload as well as the execution time of a
processing step.
SAP Exception Management
Prerequisites


SAP Solution Manager 7.1 SP05 and
higher
ST-PI 2008_1 700 SP06 and higher
Learn more about
SAP Exception Management
http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/Te
chOps/Home --> Exception Management