2.2    SAP NetWeaver Administrator

For those of you who are familiar with the older versions of SAP PI, you’ll remember the pains of jumping back and forth between the different administrative and monitoring tools. These included a mixture of web-based, command-line, and desktop clients. It was time to consolidate the handling of these different tasks and to bring some simplicity and consistency to the table.

SAP NetWeaver Administrator provides a consolidated one-stop shop from which you can perform administrative, monitoring, and troubleshooting tasks. It’s a web-based tool that is easy to access and use. SAP NetWeaver Administrator is your entry point to SAP PO’s administration environment and serves as a central tool containing a multitude of applications (grouped into work centers) to facilitate the execution of administrative and operative tasks of your SAP PO installation. It’s also used by other SAP NetWeaver components and can accommodate users of different expertise. Depending on the user’s role, only certain sections of SAP NetWeaver Administrator can be accessed. This ensures that only experts or authorized personnel can perform specific activities.

To access SAP NetWeaver Administrator (see Figure 2.17), go to http://<hostname>:<port>/nwa, where <hostname> is the hostname of the SAP NetWeaver system, and <port> is the port number of the SAP NetWeaver system.

Figure 2.17    SAP NetWeaver Administrator

Tips

You can directly access the SAP NetWeaver Administrator section that focuses on SAP PI functionalities and includes all the monitoring tools via http://<hostname>:<port>/nwapi. This way of accessing SAP NetWeaver Administrator is also referred to as the central mode.

Given the many applications and tools hosted on top of the SAP NetWeaver Administrator, finding the right application can be a challenge. To simplify finding these applications, use one of the following methods:

• Quick link or shortcut page
  The quick link or shortcut page can be accessed via http://<hostname>:<port>/nwa/quicklinks, where the <hostname> and <port> are the hostname and port number, respectively, of the SAP NetWeaver installation.
• Search functionality
  If you know the name of the tool that you need, you can use the Search box on the top-right side of your screen (see Figure 2.18).

Figure 2.18    SAP NetWeaver Administrator Search Area

• Browsing the different work centers
  The administrative functions included in the SAP NetWeaver Administrator are grouped into work centers according to the types of functionality areas they cover. Work centers are divided into work sets, which group related administration areas. SAP NetWeaver Administrator contains the following work centers:
  • Availability and Performance
  • Operations
  • Configuration
  • Troubleshooting
  • SOA

Each of these work center categories will be described in the next sections.

2.2.1    Availability and Performance

As part of the availability and performance features, the Availability and Performance work center tab covers the following functionalities:

• System Overview
  Provides an overall status of the performance and availability of different components of the SAP NetWeaver AS Java (see Figure 2.19).
  

  Figure 2.19    SAP NetWeaver Administrator: System Overview

• Resource Monitoring
  Provides monitoring functionalities for the usage of the system resources. This monitoring includes SAP Java Connector (SAP JCo) monitoring, distributed transactions, session management, locks, system performance statistics, and history reports.
• Process Monitoring
  Provides an overview of all messages going through the Advanced Adapter Engine (AAE). A detailed and aggregated view of the status of messages is also presented.

• BPM System Overview
  Provides an overview of the business process management (BPM) system status, including information such as the following:
  • Process server availability and status
  • Process instance memory threshold
  • An overview of process instances and their statuses
  • An overview of tasks and their statuses

2.2.2    Operations

The Operations work center screen contains relevant tools and applications (see Figure 2.20) to support the day-to-day administration activities required to maintain your SAP PO running interfaces, processes, and SAP NetWeaver AS Java server. The following working areas are covered by the Operations work center:

• Systems
  Provides basic management functionalities for the installed applications and their statuses. You can also stop or start all available applications.
• Data and Databases
  Manages all archiving-related activities.
• Jobs
  Facilitates the management of scheduled jobs using the Java Scheduler.
• Processes and Tasks
  Centrally manage and monitor BPM processes and tasks. It’s possible here to view process details, instance flow, definition flow, and running history.

Figure 2.20    SAP NetWeaver Administration: Operations Work Center

2.2.3    Configuration

The Configuration work center screen (see Figure 2.21) includes functionalities that can be categorized as follows:

• Security
  Covers all security aspects of SAP NetWeaver AS Java, including SSO, identity management, certificates, and connection destinations.
• Infrastructure
  Contains a large number of services and features to support the management of SAP NetWeaver development infrastructure. These features are commonly used during development and troubleshooting activities. They include Java system properties, development infrastructure, log configuration, and system information.
• Scenarios
  Facilitates the installation of additional components during the initial setup of the SAP NetWeaver system.
• Processes and Tasks
  Enables the viewing of all deployed BPM components and their deployment details (versions, deployment dates, etc.) and also enables starting a BPM process.
• Connectivity
  Provides the functionality to create connection destinations and JCo Remote Function Call (RFC) providers between ABAP and Java requests.

Figure 2.21    SAP NetWeaver Administrator: Configuration Work Center

2.2.4    Troubleshooting

The Troubleshooting work center screen delivers numerous debugging and monitoring applications (see Figure 2.22) capable of providing support for troubleshooting your integration and BPM applications running on your SAP NetWeaver AS Java.

Figure 2.22    SAP NetWeaver Administrator: Troubleshooting Work Center

The Troubleshooting work center also includes an extensive Log Viewer tool that enables log, trace, and application dump analysis features for troubleshooting SAP PO. See Figure 2.23 for a closer look at the Log Viewer inside this work center.

Figure 2.23    SAP NetWeaver Administrator: Log Viewer

2.2.5    SOA

The SOA work center screen comes loaded with a broad set of configuration tools (see Figure 2.24) that mainly specialize in enabling the provision and consumption of web services. The monitoring area within the SOA work center also groups different types of monitoring tools (Message Monitor, IDoc Adapter Monitor, Performance Monitor, etc.) to help you find the correct tool from the same place.

In this work center, you define and manage different communication and technical configuration used by SAP PO main components (i.e., SAP PI, SAP BPM, and SAP Business Rules Management [SAP BRM]). Make sure you get familiar with its tools and functions because you’ll use it often, in particular when developing and configuring SAP BPM solutions to configure service groups and communication components.

Figure 2.24    SAP NetWeaver Administrator: SOA Work Center

The SOA work center functions are categorized as follows:

• Technical Configuration
  Maintain and configure destinations to other (external) services and components used by SAP PO, including logon credentials, and so on.
• Application and Scenario Communication
  Provides functions for administration and configuration of web services, service groups (very critical for BPM applications), and the communication configuration of entire business scenarios. From here, you can also define Service Registry publication rules applicable for specific services or service groups.
• Log and Traces
  Provides similar functionality to that of the Troubleshooting work center, but specifically for controlling and debugging message traffic connectivity. From here, you can configure, search, and analyze logs and traces of deployed web services and RFCs in SAP PO.
• Monitoring
  An extensive collection of monitoring tools covers almost every corner of SAP PO, including IDoc adapter monitoring, proxy runtime monitoring, cache monitoring, and so on. From this area, you configure user-defined message search and message alert. Background jobs and component monitoring is also available. Message retention periods can also be configured from this area.