Architecture of SAP NetWeaver Application Server Dual Stack

SAP NetWeaver Application Server is the powerful foundation for the entire SAP software stack. It also provides a platform for other SAP NetWeaver components (for example, SAP EP, SAP NetWeaver Process Integration), as well as for ABAP and Java applications (for example, SAP Business Suite).

The design of SAP NetWeaver Application Server is aimed at providing an exceptionally high level of robustness and supportability for the applications running on it. To be able to use the applications as independently as possible of the hardware environment, SAP NetWeaver Application Server Dual Stack consists of Application Server ABAP (AS ABAP) and Application Server Java (AS JAVA).

The architecture of SAP NetWeaver Application Server Dual Stack and basic terminology are explained below. For details, see the component-specific documentation.

Specifications of SAP NetWeaver Application Server

SAP NetWeaver Application Server can be installed in various specifications depending on the SAP product and applications used. A distinction is made between ABAP systems, Java systems, and dual-stack systems.

Concept of the Monitoring Architecture

The alerts are displayed in a tree structure in the alert monitor, and assigned a severity and a color (yellow for a warning, red for a problem). You can see the current status of your system and process alerts here. The alert monitor is based on the monitoring architecture, which was introduced in SAP R/3 4.0:

The CCMS monitoring architecture is not a monolithic monitoring and administration program. Rather, it offers a flexible framework into which extensive monitoring and administration functions can easily be added.

The elements of the monitoring architecture function largely independently of each other and can, particularly, be further developed and adjusted independently of each other.

·  Data Supplier

A data supplier is a program that delivers data to the monitoring architecture. It belongs to one of the individual system components and creates monitoring objects that report values to the monitoring architecture. The monitoring architecture is delivered with the data suppliers for the most important components of your SAP system and its environment and can therefore be immediately used.

Data suppliers pass their information to the monitoring architecture. The monitoring architecture provides an infrastructure for gathering and managing system information. The monitoring architecture therefore constantly compares the values reported by the data suppliers for the monitored objects with threshold values and displays an alert if a value exceeds or falls below a threshold value.

·  Data Consumers

A data consumer is a program that reads data from the monitoring architecture; it displays the information transferred to the monitoring architecture by the data suppliers. SAP delivers both the standard data consumer and other special monitors that all use the data delivered by the monitoring architecture.

·  Monitoring Objects and Attributes

A monitoring object describes an object that is to be monitored. A monitoring attribute represents a type of information that is to be reported for a monitoring object. Monitoring objects include, for example, the CPU in your host system, the database, and SAP services, such as background processing. Monitoring attributes for a CPU object could be CPU utilization and the average CPU workload for the last five minutes.

The alert monitor also provides the administration methods that you need to monitor the system. In this way, you can set threshold values for alerts and add or adjust auto-reaction and analysis methods: if an alert is triggered, auto-reaction methods react automatically, and you can use an analysis method to investigate the cause of an alert without leaving the alert monitor. The monitoring architecture also contains tools for administering and archiving the alerts.

SAP CIN Interview Questions & Answers

1.     How does CIN determine the tax rates?

CIN determines taxes based on the chapter-id of the material. There are 2 levels for rate determination. First the system will check if there is an exceptional rate available. If this is available then that rate is picked up. This rate could be for a material or material and customer combination. If there are no exceptions then the system looks for chapter-id of that material.  The customer will have an excise tax status, which along with the plant status will give a final excise status. Based on the excise status and the chapter-id the rates are maintained.

2.      Can I change the tax rates retrospectively?

You can change the excise rates with any given validity period. After making the changes you will have to update the sales orders if the new tax rates have to be considered for future deliveries.

How SAP BW and HANA will merge over time -- and why it matters

Though SAP swears HANA won't replace Business Warehouse (BW), there are good reasons to believe the in-memory analytics platform will eventually absorb BW. But I think it is more accurate to say thatSAP BW and HANA will begin to merge. If this scenario plays out as I believe it will, the murkiness surrounding skill and technology decisions between BW and HANA starts to clear.

This article describes the likely paths of BW and HANA and outlines three possible scenarios for their convergence, or lack thereof. While this discussion of roadmaps is speculative, it's informed by carefully watching SAP's moves and a good understanding of the products and technologies involved. I've linked to public statements from SAP. Anything not referencing such public statements is speculative.

Does SAP HANA Replace BW?

Well – I can’t say I am surprised by all the debate on Twitter about SAP HANA potentially replacing BW. I wrote this blog in response to about 50 tweets I saw on Friday about the topic. I plan on covering four scenarios in this blog that will hopefully help guide people. Those scenarios are:

1. I have SAP ECC and BW, what do I do?

2. I have SAP ECC and may want BW, what do I do?

3. I have SAP ECC, but someone told me SAP BusinessObjects Rapid Marts are better, what do I do?

4. I have SAP ECC and someone told me they will design a data warehouse for me from scratch, what do I do?

Top BusinessObjects interview questions (BO) with Answers

Welcome to the finest collection of SAP BusinessObjects (BO a.k.a BOBJ) Interview Questions with standard Answers. Based on our years of experience in BusinessObjects reporting tool, we have hand-picked these questions and provided to-the-point answers to each one of them so as to help you prepare better for BusinessObjects job interviews.

1. What are the differences between Personal, Shared and Secured connections?

1. A Personal connection is created by one user and cannot be used by other users. The connection details are stored in PDAC.LSI file.
2. A shared connection can be used by other users through a shared server. The connection details are stored in SDAC.LSI file in the Business Objects installation folder. However one cannot set rights and securities on objects in a shared connection. Neither can a Universe to exported to repository using a shared connection
3. A secured connection overcomes these limitations. Through it rights can be set on objects and documents. Universes can be exported to the central repository only through a secured connection. The connection parameters in this case are saved in the CMS

SAP HANA and Vistex

Leverage all your data to get real-time insights and lightning fast processing speeds with the revolutionary SAP HANA technology.  SAP HANA is changing how real time information is accessed by business decision-makers, giving them unprecedented insight into data that helps them lead their organizations. 

So, the next question is, does Vistex support SAP HANA technology?  The clear answer is a resounding YES!

SAP solution extensions by Vistex are currently available to support operational and analytical reporting using SAP HANA.  The great news is—customers do not need new or additional software to enable the flow of operational data from Vistex to data marts or SAP Business Warehouse powered by HANA.

Additionally, Vistex solutions will be available very soon for SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA.   In fact, Vistex is a leading SAP Ramp-Up Partner and is currently testing the compatibility of SAP solution extensions by Vistex with SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA.  Compatibility testing is expected to be completed in July 2013.

SAP HANA and SAP solution extensions by Vistex provide organizations with exceptional insight for leaders to manage and more efficiently run their businesses.  SAP and Vistex – partners in progress for the future.

The future of SAP Business Applications

SAP is pouring development dollars into HANA, and the most fascinating innovations in business applications that SAP has to offer, run only on HANA. To name a few:

- The next-generation SAP Smart/Simple Financials and the rest of the Suite that will follow

- All the BW 7.4 Data Warehouse enhancements for logical modeling, data virtualization and simplicity

- The SAP BPC Unified Model

- HANA Live Operational Reports

- 70% of Fiori Apps that combine transactions and analytics

Is SAP a legacy application in your business?

If SAP is a legacy application in your business (or in a specific area of the business), then you would be smart not to spend money on it. I deal with customers who have business operations that are non-strategic, or geographies they look to sell or close. Those customers are often characterized because they moved to support vendors like Rimini Street to reduce the continued cost of ownership.

If this is the case, and you just want to keep the lights on for a particular business, then you would be smart not to move to HANA for this area, because there must be more pressing business concerns. In this case, you should stick on whatever database vendor offers the absolute lowest cost of ownership, which is probably the one you're on already, unless you're running your business on a Mainframe. Buy VMWare and get the cost as low as possible.

Or are you looking to innovate?

If you are looking to innovate, then you need to balance cost and benefit. For some customers, they do this in a point way and innovate in the cloud, using Workday, SuccessFactors, SalesForce, Ariba or one of many others. From the perspective of a specific business objective, the world has moved back to best of breed solutions in the cloud.

However this has not happened for the core of most businesses. Workday and Salesforce are trying to enter the financials market, but there is barely a challenger for the core of SAP's business - the business network and supply chain. When it comes to moving products around the world, between thousands of warehouses, with tens of thousands of employees and thousands of outlets.

Core ERP is alive and kicking.

SAP HANA Cloud Portal Q3+ 2014 Release Highlights

Lots of exciting new features and enhancements were added to the SAP HANA Cloud Portal product during Q3 2014. In this blog I will emphasize the major topics while the full list can be viewed in the the Cloud Portal Product Documentation under Release Notes. I've decided to name this blog Q3+ release highlights to include few last minute items that were delivered with our latest release a week ago.

Creating Cloud Portal Widgets in SAP Web IDE

SAP HANA Cloud Portal now provides external plugins for the SAP Web IDE development environment, allowing developers to easily create OpenSocial widgets, and deploy them directly to SAP HANA Cloud. You can create different types of OpenSocial widgets by using predefined templates that represent the most common flows in Cloud Portal.

Getting Started

You can experience the new Cloud Portal plugins using your HANA Cloud Platfrom developer trial account. To get started you will have to configure first the Web IDE’s plugin settings:

1. In the Web IDE’s main menu at the top, go to Tools > External Plugins.
2. From the Plugin Repository drop down list select the SAP Plugins item.
3. Select the checkbox to enable the SAP HANA Cloud Portal external plugins.

You can now create a new project in the Web IDE based on the desired widget template. Fill in the required information in the wizard and click finish.

When done, you will be able to preview your application before it even gets to run in the portal.

SAPUI5: The power of HTML5 for SAP’s UI Development

SAPUI5 is the name of the latest user Interface Development Toolkit for SAP. This extremely powerful JavaScript framework has been developed to enhance the experience with SAP application user interfaces so that they become faster and platform independent. Furthermore, the traditional SAP layout has been enhanced by innovative and more modern user interface components. It comes with rich set of standard and extension controls and a lightweight programming model.

SAPUI5 is an interesting and modern framework that relies on standards and open source like  jQuery, HTML5, JavaScript, CSS, and others. It is expandable as a base frame and was developed to better support modern browsers like Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox, ect.

The SAPUI5 applications operate on large a wide range of equipment (Smartphone, tablet, desktop) and multiple server platforms.

SAPUI5 applications run on a wide range of devices

This modern UI Toolkitis optimized to consume different sources of data.ie XML,JSON, ODATA and provides a model for each previous format allowing easy data manipulation and integration with UI controls via the binding feature,for instance you can easily bind a Model to a DataTable:

Getting started with SAP Fiori, NetWeaver Gateway & SAPUI5

So you’ve heard all about SAP Fiori, NetWeaver Gateway and more recently SAPUI5 and are looking to get started, but unsure how. There is a vast amount of information available on all of these topics, and as a result it can be very difficult to get up and running.

In this post I’m going to distil some of the information and give you the material you need to start building apps.

SAP NetWeaver Gateway

Gateway is nothing new in the SAP world, however with the growing popularity of mobile applications and SAPUI5, it is becoming more prevalent. At its most simple level SAP NetWeaver Gateway is used to expose information from one or more systems, usually SAP ones, to the outside world.

If you do not currently have access to a Gateway enabled server you can download and install a trial, and guides for doing this on various operating systems can be found here.

Some words of advice here from Bluefin’s own Ron Sargeant, and King of the Gateway SCN, are that if you  just want  to play around at consuming services, then the service consumption trial is the quickest and easiest way to do this. The other trials are rather long-winded and time-consuming and only of interest if you are planning to write your own services. It’s probably simpler to set up a real sandbox server within your business environment as the infrastructure is already in place and Gateway is a relatively small bolt-on. Whereas with the SAP trials you are installing a SAP infrastructure in order to bolt Gateway on, so it’s bigger, time-limited and prone to issues.