IDocs (Intermediate Documents) are standard containers for exchanging data between applications. Between SAP applications they are transferred using the ALE (Application Link Enabling) layer which again uses either tRFC or File technology as the underlying technique.
An IDoc contains different types of information. It contains the application data to be exchanged (e.g. a sales orders) as well as technical data providing information from where to where the IDoc is supposed to be sent. Furthermore, the IDoc also contains status information that shows which processing step within the data exchange the IDoc is currently in. These statuses can indicate error situations or success situations. Some of them can be intermediate statuses that are indicating backlog situations.
For an end-to-end ALE monitoring it is necessary to monitor the various IDoc statuses in the outbound as well as the inbound direction.
To monitor IDocs the following prerequisites have to be met by the managed system:
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:
For the category 'IDoc' you can collect payload information from the IDoc and display this payload in the AIM application in SAP Focused Run. You can then use this information to search for related messages in PI or CPI, related IDocs, or related web service calls. Find out how to set up the collection of payload information here.
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
IDoc
For IDoc Monitoring you can collect all IDocs sent or received in the managed system. You can also use the following filter parameters, to restrict the data collection:
To find the correct values for the IDocs you want to monitor, you can use transaction WE05 in the managed system to display the IDoc and the filter values.
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 interfaces of type IDoc the following metrics are collected:
IDoc
Which statuses fall into status group ERROR and status group INTERMEDIATE is based on the IDoc customizing tables STACUST and STALIGHT in the managed system. The customizing table STACUST which determines the qualification for an IDoc status is maintained with transaction WE47.