Very often customer incidents contain little or not enough information for us support engineers to start analyzing the reported issue. Missing information, not working system connection often lead to a so called ping-pong with the customer, which will extend the processing time of an incident by far. Following this
guideline you will be able to provide all the required details to SAP Support for your issue in order it can be analyzed directly, thus helping to reduce the average processing time of the incident.
Before you create a incident
- First try to find a solution to your problem in the SCN Forums or Wiki.
- If you have BADIs implemented in SRM, that could influence the system behavior regarding your issue, kindly try to verify your problem scenario with deactivated BADIs.
- During incident creation you will be given the option to search for notes about your issue. Please use this possibility since a large number of issues can be solved by already existing notes. For some hints on efficient note search please visit this Wiki page: http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/x/pAzcCw
- Please always take your time to read and answer the Component Specific Questions during incident creation, which will provide us with additional valuable information.
- Kindly refer to note 67739 for a description about incident priorities. Please make sure your issue fulfills the requirements for the selected priority, specially in case of very high priority.
- Please make sure to select the correct component for your incident. Creating the incident on the wrong component can lead to increased processing times. You can refer to note 1752561 on a description of the SRM component structure.
System connections
In order we can analyze the issue in most cases it will be necessary to logon to your system. Whenever possible please try to reproduce your issue in a test or development environment and provide us with access to this system instead of your production system. The following connection types are commonly used for analyzing an SRM incident.
- R/3 service connection (also called as SAPGUI connection)
Please refer to note 812732, on how to open this kind of connection. - HTTP connection
Access to the web user interface of SRM is only possible via a HTTP connection. Please refer to note 592085on how to configure this connection type. Please maintain the correct URL for your portal or NWBC pages. - WTS connection
As an alternative to the HTTP connection, we can also use a WTS connection to logon to your system and access the SRM web UI from inside this WTS server. In case of SRM issues involving an external catalog this is the preferred and recommended connection type. The configuration of this connection type is described in note 605795. Please make sure that the tool HTTPwatch is installed on the WTS system, for more info on this please see note 1697063. - LOP
Please also consider to use our Line Opener Program (LOP). For more information about this possibility please refer to note 1757997.
Connection errors
The most delay in processing customer incidents is caused by connection errors, respectively resolving these errors. Therefore please always make sure that the opened system connections are working properly before creating or sending back the incident to SAP. The most common connection errors and their solution are detailed below.
- Error: SNC processing failed - resolved by note 1178684
- Error: internal error - resolved by note 1178628
- Error: partner not reached, Error: connection to partner broken, Time out errors - resolved by notes 1178624 and 1178631
- Error: route permission denied - resolved by note 1178546
Please make sure that you are not using generic entries with ‘*’ in the saproutetab in your SAProuter, as this only releases SAP ports (32**) and no ports outside this area. For HTTP connections the ports used by the http or https protocol must be permitted in your saproutetab explicitly. If you are using SRM integrated into an Enterprise Portal, please also add separate permit entries both for your portal and SRM systems with the corresponding ports used. For example:
KP "p:CN=sapserv2, OU=SAProuter, O=SAP, C=DE" portal.yourdomain.com 50100
KP "p:CN=sapserv2, OU=SAProuter, O=SAP, C=DE" srm.yourdomain.com 8080
User data
To logon over the opened connection valid userdata is also required. To provide us the credentials in a safe way, please do not put the passwords directly into the incident, instead use the Secure Area as described in note 508140. There are typically two types of user required for support analysis:
- application user
Also called as reproducing user, who is capable to logon to your SRM portal web interface over the HTTP connection and reproduce the issue you reported in your incident. Please always make sure that this user has the required authorization and roles to reproduce the issue, is integrated into the organizational structure in PPOMA_BBP, and has the correct attributes setup. Please also assign debugging authorization to this user, which is needed for external debugging the application. - technical user
This user is used for system analysis by logging in over the SAPGUI connection. The technical user should have all necessary authorizations including but not limited to display and execute coding, display database tables, system settings and customizing, as well as debugging rights.
These two types of users can be provided as two separate SU01 users or as a single user, depending on your preference. But in all cases kindly make sure that the SU01 users are in the validity date with valid password and they are not locked.
Description of the issue
- Please provide your software component versions with SP (Support Package) levels. For your SRM or SUS system please provide the SAP_BASIS and SRM_SERVER component versions. For your ECC system, if relevant for your issue, please provide the SAP_BASIS and SAP_APPL component versions. For MDM issues please attach the component information available under: http://<J2EE_SERVER>:PORT/monitoring/ComponentInfo
- Please create a step by step description with screenshots about your issue, mentioning all the details, user data and example data to use for reproducing the problem. Please don’t attach individual screenshots one by one to the incident, instead use Microsoft Word or Excel to put your screens into a single file. Compressing the attached document into an archive file is not necessary, you can attach up to 4 MB for a single file.
- If you are experiencing a dump, please export it into the HTML format and attach it to the incident.
- Please mention any modifications, BADIs. custom code that could influence the behavior.
- If you are reopening a incident previously closed in all cases please mention the incident number of the closed incident for reference. Also please do not insert the complete text content of the closed incident into the new one, only reattach any files, documents to the new incident that were present in the
old one. - If you have tried to find a solution for the problem prior to send the incident to SAP, list the steps you have made and the notes you have implemented.
Contact data
- At the end of your incident please sign the incident with your name, so that we are aware who the responsible person is.
- Also please leave your direct phone number and specify the timeframe and timezone in which you are available for calls. For priority very high incidents a 24/7 phone number is required in all cases.
Useful information
- You can use the template.txt attached to KBA 1760800 for the description of your issue. Please fill out only the relevant parts for your system landscape and for your issue.
- If have access to SAP Enterprise Support Academy on the Service Marketplace please follow this link for a short presentation about how to create "The Perfect Customer Message": SAP Enterprise Support Academy -> SAP Supportability Basics -> The Perfect Customer Message
