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Summary
SAP Operational Process Intelligence provides real-time operational intelligence on end-to-end processes spanning across SAP and non-SAP systems. These processes span across multiple systems, applications and middlewares. Most of the time, system landscapes are built in a way that integration middlewares like SAP Process Integration, mediate the communication between applications, systems and partners. It is important to have the capability to have insights into these middleware systems to gain end-to-end process visibility.
SAP Operational Process Intelligence offers the capability to discover message flows, collect and correlate data from SAP Process Integration to gain visibility into the middleware systems.
Message flow events are based on the status of flow. Message flow events are treated as any other events in the business scenario. The following events can be observed on message flow instances.
- Started - This event represents that a message has been received from the sender
- Completed - This event represents that a message was successfully sent from the sender to receiver
- Error - This event represents that a message was sent but not received due to an error situation. For example, if the receiver is down or if the receiver channel is stopped.
- Cancelled - This event represents that the message flow was cancelled after the message has been sent
Information about the message flow is available in the payload of a message or its dynamic header. User-defined search in SAP Process Integration has to be used to expose relevant search attributes from the payload. The context of the message flow participant is derived from these attributes. More details on the user-defined search can be found here.
All the configurations that are required to be done in SAP Process Integration for visibility using SAP Operational Process Intelligence are documented here.
Use cases
SAP Operational Process Intelligence supports real-time visibility on the following integration centric scenarios.
Visibility on Message Flow(s)
Message flows can be discovered from SAP Process Integration systems using the search console. Message flow can be added as participant (by drag and drop from search console to the message flow in the scenario) to a business scenario and it is represented as a message data store.
A message flow is treated as a stand-alone participant in the business scenario without the need of the sender and receiver system. The message flow events can be used just as any other events. For example, message flow events can start or end a business scenario and can be used in phases, measures and indicators.
Business scenarios can start with a message flow event. This is helpful in cases where the source of the message flow is a black box or a third-party system. Business scenario can end with a message flow event. This is helpful in cases where the receiver of the message flow is a black box system or a third-party system.
For example in a typical invoice management process automation, transfer of invoices among the 3rd Party systems happen via SAP Process Integration and validation happens via SAP Business Process Management system. We could achieve end-to-end visibility over invoices by configuring a business scenario with all the involved message flows and business processes as participants.
Visibility on message acknowledgements
Message acknowledgments are used to request acknowledgements from receivers in B2B scenarios. Message acknowledgements is modeled as a separate integration flow in a typical B2B use case. The message acknowledgements can be discovered as any other message flow in a business scenario.
The message acknowledgement participant can be correlated to the message flow participant using the 'CorrelationId' attribute. 'CorrelationId' attribute is available only if 'EDISearchParameters' module is configured for the message acknowledgement. Additionally 'CorrelationId' attribute should be exposed as context using the User Defined Search configuration (just like any other context attribute).
For example, A corporate sends a transaction to a bank through SAP Process Integration(Request) and bank sends back acknowledgement to corporate once the transaction is processed (Response). In this case, two message flows (one for Request and one for Response) are discovered and assembled in the business scenario. Request and Response participants can be correlated using ‘CorrelationId’ attribute.
Support for multiple receivers
Each combination of sender and receiver is treated as a message flow. So if you have multiple receivers, each combination of sender and receiver has to be discovered as a participant in the business scenario.
For example, an integration flow is modeled as one sender (Sender1) sends a message to two receivers (Receiver1 and Receiver2). This integration flow is discovered as two message flow participants (Sender1-Receiver1, Sender2-Receiver2). These two participants can be correlated using a common context attribute.
Pre-requisites
SAP Operational Process Intelligence uses Integration Visibility component from SAP Process Integration to discover message flows and fetch the monitoring events in runtime. More details on Integration Visibility component can be found here.
More specifically, SAP Operational Process Intelligence uses central IV Core component and the data collector for PI Advanced Adapter Engine which are shipped with SAP Process Integration 731 SP7 and higher. The ABAP-based data collectors are shipped with STPI Add-On for 6.40 systems and higher.
Message flow data needs to be replicated into HANA System where SAP Operational Process Intelligence is installed. This can be done using standard SAP data replication methods for SAP Landscape Transformation (SLT) replication.
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