cbs PI MeMo App – New Monitoring Features and Improved Error Handling

[Denny]

Around a month ago cbs launched the new version of the PI MeMo app that fits with Apple’s iOS 7 look and feel. As announced in the original presentation of this app, I will use this blog to describe the new features of that version in more detail.

Communication Channel Monitoring

This requested feature complements the message monitoring capabilities. It allows searching for communication channels and provides a quick overview over the state of those channels. This presents an advantage over the message monitoring in case you are looking for the state of a connected system where the communication channel is used amongst multiple interfaces or in case you use lookup channels where errors are only indirectly shown in the message monitoring.

The usage is as follows:

1. You get an overview of the state already presented in the search result list
2. You can tap to get a more detailed overview of one particular channel
3. You can select one or multiple channels in order to start or stop channels (external control must be allowed)

Technical Improvements

The first version relied on Apple’s VPN capabilities in order to monitor your PI system securely from your mobile device outside your company’s network. The new version supports a secure connection to your system over HTTPS.

There are two options:

1. “https” – This option requires the certificate imported into the keystore of your device to allow the connection to the given hostname (recommended option).
2. “https (trust host w/o CERT check)” – This option opens a secure connection to your given host but it will trust that host without a certificate check. You don’t have to import the certificate, but you are responsible that you have the correct hostname in your connection settings.

Then, after the connection is set the app will give you now more meaningful error message in case something went wrong.

Finally, the error handling with the PI system itself is improved. In case the Web Service API doesn’t give the expected results a detailed error message is given so that one doesn’t have to dig in the log files in the NetWeaver Administrator.

The presented features and other improvements regarding functionality and usability such as multi-select and improved searching capabilities are based on the feedback we got through the SCN as well as directly from users of our app. Therefore, we encourage you to give feedback, e.g. in the comments below, in order to help us to further improve this app.