Are Your ABAP Systems Healthy? Give them a Regular Checkup with SOA Manager

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Those of you who attend your doctor for regular checkups are possibly more likely to live better and longer. And what about your peace of mind, at least for a short period after the checkup, knowing that everything is in order? Those little niggles or aches and pains - it is good to know that they are not something horrible about to take you down. And if something is discovered, is it not better to know and do something about it?

Unlike going to the doctor, there is nothing to fear with the health checks in SOA Manager. They only check for things that are fixable.

Health Checks from SOAMANAGER

When your Web services landscape is up and running, it is easy to forget that there are a lot of underlying things that need to be just right.

Connecting two ABAP systems is not difficult when everything is set up correctly. But if your connection is not working, you can spend a lot of time looking in the wrong place for the problem. A successful connection depends on diverse settings in the systems and clients involved.This is where health checks come in. Some possible uses are:

• A previously working connection has failed. Is the landscape healthy?
• You are adding a system to the landscape. Is it set up correctly for connectivity?
• You are configuring a new connection and something is wrong. Is it the landscape?
• You have upgraded a system. Is there an extra setting perhaps that you do not know about?
• Maybe you just want to check on a regular basis that everything is in order. For example, there may be very little traffic between two systems so you do not get advance warning that something is wrong before that critical call is made.

If the health checks are in order, you can focus your troubleshooting activities on other typical problems such as incompatible WSDLs, security values, and so on.

Some checks are client-specific and some are not. From a central system you can execute health checks in selected managed systems and clients.The checks are documented in the Options screen. For some errors, you have the option to get SOA Manager to do an automated repair for you.

Example

Do you know all the ICF root nodes that are relevant for Web services? Of the top of my head I don’t. So let us take an example where one of these nodes is deactivated.

I use transaction SICF to deactivate the service scs.

Now I go to transaction SOAMANAGER and find the Tools tab where the Health Check function is found.

I click on Health Check and then the Options button.

I am only interested in the ICF nodes so I deselect the others.

I click OK and then the Run button.

For this demonstration I am only interested in the local system, so I select that and press OK.

I expand to see more details and find the Repair button.

I click the Repair button.

The repair has worked but the health check has not been rerun.

So I display the Health Check Run screen again.

I click the Rerun Repaired button.

Now everything is green.

And in transaction SICF I can see that the relevant node has been activated.

Background Jobs

If you want to run health checks automatically and periodically, you can schedule a background job with the well-known transaction SM36. The program to use in this case is SRT_CFG_HEALTH_CHECK. The results can be displayed in SOAMANAGER as normal, but you also have the option for them to be sent in an email.

Conclusion

Health checks from SOA Manager, or as background jobs, could save you a lot of frustration when working with Web services.