SAP Central Finance enables customers with more than one older SAP ERP system to replicate FI documents from these SAP ERP systems into a central Finance system running on SAP S/4HANA. In the SAP Central Finance system customer can leverage the capabilities of SAP HANA to achieve a organization-wide financial view with real-time reporting capabilities.
SAP Central Finance doesn't operate as a standalone system but rather depends on data replication from other SAP ERP systems. This FI documents are usually replicated using SAP SLT. Master data is usually done using IDocs.
So when it comes to monitoring, verifying the data flow completeness is only a part of the whole monitoring scenario. To monitor the entire SAP Central Finance scenario, monitoring the following components should be considered
For Master Data Replication:
For Transactional Data:
The setup for Data Flow Verification is described on this portal page. For the other components please follow the links to the setup pages.
To be able to monitor SAP cFIN documents via Data Flow Verification you need:
| Report | Description | cFIN Transaction |
|---|---|---|
| FINS_CFIN_DFV_CO_DOC_COUNT | Use this report to check whether all internal controlling documents (secondary postings) that have been transferred with the CO interface, have been posted in the Central Finance system as expected. | FINS_CFIN_DFV_CO_NUM |
| FINS_CFIN_DFV_FI_DOC_COUNT | Use this report to check whether all journal entries (accounting documents) from the source system have been posted in the Central Finance system as expected. | FINS_CFIN_DFV_FI_NUM |
| FINS_CFIN_DFV_PCA_DOC_COUNT | Use this report to check whether EC-PCA documents or balances are replicated to the Central Finance system correctly. | FINS_CFIN_DFV_PCA_CN |
| FINS_CFIN_DFV_CMT_DOC_COUNT | Use this report to check whether all commitment line items have been posted in the Central Finance system as expected. | FINS_CFIN_DFV_CMTNUM |
Before configuring the data collection in FRun, variants for the comparison reports need to be created in the Central Finance system. You need at least one variant for each source system. Additionally to the source system name you can add further source system specific filters like the controlling area or the company code.
Please note: Do not maintain time-related parameters, like date or period in your variant. Time-based settings for the report run are calculated by FRun using additional input parameters in the setup session.
For more information on the cFIN comparison reports please refer to: https://help.sap.com/S4_OP_CFIN > Configuration: Central Finance > Comparison Reports
To be able to monitor interfaces of an on-premise system you first have to add it to Interface & Cloud Monitoring and select the monitoring categories you want to monitor for the system.
In the next step, you see all monitoring categories which are available for the system, depending on the system type and the installed software components. Some recommended standard monitoring categories are preselected.
Select the monitoring categories in scope.
Available Monitoring Categories
The available monitoring categories are:
After selecting your monitoring categories you have to maintain filters to define what exactly you want to monitor. Some monitoring categories come with standard filters that usually just select all items of this monitoring category. SAP Focused Run can handle this high amount of monitoring data, so you can stick to this standard filters. Or you can set up filters of your own. You can create more than one filter for a monitoring category.
Available Filter Options
Data Flow Verification
In the Data Flow Verification setup in FRun you first select the comparison report you want to use. The available reports are described on the section "Preparations in the Central Finance System" above.
After selecting the comparison report you can further restrict the selection via the following parameters:
Not all parameters are relevant for each reports. The following table shows which parameters can be set for which report:
| Report | Possible parameters |
|---|---|
| FINS_CFIN_DFV_CO_DOC_COUNT | Variant, Date, Time Period, Delay |
| FINS_CFIN_DFV_FI_DOC_COUNT | Variant, Date, Time Period, Delay |
| FINS_CFIN_DFV_PCA_DOC_COUNT | Variant, Date (ENTRY_DATE only), Time Period, Delay |
| FINS_CFIN_DFV_CMT_DOC_COUNT | Variant, Time Period, Delay |
The setup of the filters for the monitoring categories only makes sure that the data is collected, however, alerts are not created automatically. To create alerts and notifications you have to create an alert individually. If you didn't use specific filters in the setup before, but rather opted to collect all data, you have to create filters for the alerts.
In the next sub-step, you have to maintain the filter. The filter values are the same as described above. For some metrics, you have to maintain metric parameters. Find details below in the overview of the available metrics.
In the last sub-step you have to activate the alert:
For single exceptions, the threshold type is always 'Already Rated'. This means depending on the calculation frequency the number of exceptions is checked and an alert is created if this number is bigger than 0. If you want to reduce the number of alert for these metrics, you could increase the value for the calculation frequency to increase the time between checks.
Available Metrics
For Data Flow Verification the following metrics are collected:
For all metrics the following filter parameters are available: