Day: February 1, 2018

Abstract: The “SAP Cloud Platform Solution Diagram & Icon Guidelines” (MS PowerPoint slide deck) makes documenting viable SAP Cloud Platform solution implementations easier than ever before. It includes a comprehensive set of official SAP Cloud Platform service icons, capability icons, graphical design elements and a set of sample diagrams. All these tools can be used to design SAP Cloud Platform solution diagrams, schematics of different complexity, and to illustrate the work of SAP Cloud Platform, its services, solutions and SAP products, and the ways of their use. Learn how to build your own diagrams for SAP Cloud Platform end-2-end solution scenarios.

Why SAP Cloud Platform Solution Diagrams & Icons

SAP is dedicated to providing you the best approaches to realize solutions on SAP Cloud Platform. As Sudhanshu Srivastava describes in his blog Rethinking enablement assets for the SAP Cloud Platform! our new SAP Cloud Platform Solution Diagrams and Icons make an important contribution to visualize best practices and architectures of end-to-end SAP Cloud Platform solutions.

With the official set of icons, design guidelines and sample diagrams you can easily create your own SAP Cloud Platform solution diagrams by using MS PowerPoint. They are intended to reach a better and faster understanding of SAP Cloud Platform end-to-end solution scenarios as customer, partner, client, solution architect, project lead or developer by using graphical diagrams for visual learning.

Design Principles

The SAP Cloud Platform solution diagram guidelines are based on a common iconography and graphical design that follow the SAP Cloud Platform UX principles (Fiori 2.0). In this way we reach a seamless User Experience in SAP Cloud Platform front-ends (e.g. SAP Cloud Platform Cockpit, SAP Web IDE) and content assets including slide decks, blueprints or blogs (e.g. recent blogs from Murali Shanmugham) with consistent and intuitive metaphors by using shared icons and colors.

Using the Solution Diagram Guidelines in MS PowerPoint

To build your own SAP Cloud Platform solution diagram follow these steps:

* Visit our wiki page SAP Cloud Platform Solution Diagrams & Icons
* Download the MS PowerPoint slide deck SAP-Cloud-Platform_official-solution-diagrams-and-icons_v03.pptx
* Find the icon, diagram design elements and sample diagrams that you need
* Create your own SAP Cloud Platform solution diagram for own purposes including twitter, sap.com blogs, project documentation, interactions with clients or workshops

As of today MS PowerPoint is the only supported diagram format. Let’s have a closer look at the content parts inside the SAP-Cloud-Platform_official-solution-diagrams-and-icons_v03.pptx slide deck:

Use SAP Icons & Logos

Behind the formal part with legal disclaimer, terms of use, readme and table of contents the first guidelines section contains various icons & logos as the main design elements

* SAP Cloud Platform Capability Icons that are also used on the https://cloudplatform.sap.com/capabilities.html web page
* SAP Cloud Platform Service Icons in two flavors, for diagrams with blue circle, for slides without circle
* SAP Icons for technical entities, devices, users etc. in neutral grey color. These icons are provided as image objects and are re-used from the SAP Icon font that is based on the SAP Fiori iconography.
* SAP Product Logos including the SAP Cloud Platform Logo
* White-listed Third-Party Logos

Use Design Elements for MS PowerPoint Slides

In guideline section “Elements for MS PowerPoint Slides” you can find the visual elements that characterize the SAP Cloud Platform solution diagram design:

* A Color Palette that is based on a subset of colors as defined by the SAP Fiori Design Guidelines
* Areas to depict various technical entities or parts of the end-to-end solution architecture and landscape
* Cardinality Markers to depict multiple occurrences of entities
* Text in Flex Grey
* Text in L0-blue, Emphasize & Semantic Colors
* Connectors, Arrows & Lines
* Numbers

Follow Author Guidelines

To make it easier for you to create own guideline compliant solution diagrams we added some helpful explanations:

* Do’s & Don’t
* Tips & Tricks
* Arrow Directions
* How to create Colored Icons in 5 Steps
* Comparison with SAP TAM Block Diagrams
* Community Support

Pick & Choose Sample Diagrams

In the next guideline section “Solution Diagram Examples” you can pick and choose from a set of 13 SAP Cloud Platform sample diagrams which can serve as good templates for your own solution diagrams.

* SAP Fiori Cloud
* Extend SAP cloud applications
* Extend SAP cloud applications including SAP S/4HANA Cloud
* Extend SAP SuccessFactors applications
* Internet Of Things innovation
* Develop and deploy innovation applications
* Leverage Cloud Foundry to create innovative applications
* DevOps in SAP Cloud Platform
* Gaining Consumer Insights: Reference Architecture Overview
* SAP Cloud Connector 2.10: What’s new in it?
* SAP‘s modular IoT platform in cloud
* Typical S/4HANA Extension Patterns: Hub applications
* Principal Propagation

These sample diagrams were also used to in the official SAP Cloud Platform Product Overview  slide deck (see Architecture Blueprints: slides 25 – 29) or in the SAP Cloud Platform Blueprints.

Sample diagram “6/ Develop and deploy innovation applications” is also contained in a black background style to demonstrate the big advantage, that the SAP Cloud Platform solution diagram design is suited for white and black background styles with minimum modification. You only need to replace the logo image objects (to get readable texts in white or black), all other diagram elements can be kept untouched.

Sample diagram “13/ Principal Propagation” shows how to design a more comprehensive solution architecture that is characterized by various technical details like certificates, certificate authorities or identities. Just note that this diagram also makes use of colored icons (in addition to the standard grey icons, see LEGEND) as described in guideline section “Author Guidelines: How to create Colored Icons in 5 Steps”.

Terms of Use

As customer, partner, solution architect, project lead or developer working with SAP Cloud Platform you are invited to create your own solution diagrams for individual purposes including twitter, blogs, project document or interactions with clients e.g. workshops. For legal safeguard just follow the SAP Terms of Use found in document Terms Of Use for the SAP Cloud Platform Solution Diagrams, Design Elements & Icons. These terms of use govern your use of these SAP Materials (as defined in the Terms of Use), and related Content and web pages.

Watch for Updates

The SAP Cloud Platform solution diagram & icons guideline slide deck you can download from wiki page SAP Cloud Platform Solution Diagrams & Icons will be regularly updated with new versions, e.g. to include new service icons, capability icons, sample diagrams or design changes. To follow these changes that are all tracked in the “version history” table just start watching this wiki page (see following screenshot …)

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Olga Werner for her excellent design work and creativity on the variety of service icons, capability icons and diagram elements. The realization of the new SAP Cloud Platform solution diagram guidelines would not have been possible without the constructive collaboration, inspiration or feedback of many distinguished SAP colleagues like Hamsa Buvaraghan, Thomas Bieser, Jeremy Good, Bernhard Groene, Claudia Pacheco, Matthieu Pelatan, Riley Rainey, Jason Saunders, Matthias Steiner and Michael van Cutsem.

And Now, Happy Diagramming!

  http://bit.ly/2ErT6NL #SAP #SAPCloud #AI

In my last blog, I’ve explained about deployment pipeline I built for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery in ABAP. Another thing that our team has built was the application monitoring.

For our Java Spring Boot services, it can seamlessly integrate Prometheus module in the POM file and then your application is ready to be monitored with built-in metrics.

I managed to create Prometheus client for ABAP. I will explain how you can setup one for yours below.

What is Prometheus?

Prometheus is a time series database. It stores your data stream and it also has a web interface so you can query and visualize the data e.g. into a graph.

Imagine a temperature measured from a thermometer at regular interval. This is a time series data. In IT operations, this can be like CPU usage, memory allocated, etc. But in our case, we just want to monitor our application.

The concept I like is that the server will poll the data from applications instead of getting applications sending the data to the server. This ensures that monitoring will never break your application. If the monitoring server down, your applications are still running fine.

Visit their website to learn more.

Why do we need to monitor our application?

Well, have you ever wondered about the feature that you build, how much is it used by the users? How fast or slow is it? What if you want to experiment which button color would attract the customer better?

To answer these questions, you need some kind of monitoring, some kind of metric that you can measure.

Let’s start!

In this example, I will show you how we can monitor usage and response time of ABAP HelloWorld RESTful APIs.

Cloning repository

* Clone HelloWorld RESTful APIs using abapGit. Test and make sure it works. Follow this blog for more detail.
* Clone Prometheus client for ABAP using abapGit.

If you have a problem cloning the class and Shared Memory Area ZCL_SHR_PROMETHEUS_AREA then you can create it on your own as this class is automatically generated from the transaction SHMA. Make sure you configure it precisely as shown below.

Recording metrics in your application

Prepare runtime for duration metric.

Create a new instance attribute for the timer instance. DATA runtime TYPE REF TO if_abap_runtime.

In the constructor, start the timer. METHOD constructor. super->constructor( ). me->runtime = cl_abap_runtime=>create_hr_timer( ). ENDMETHOD.

Create a new method in the REST resource class (ZCL_REST_RESOURCE). METHODS record_metric IMPORTING i_method TYPE string i_response TYPE i.

The method accepts HTTP method and response status code which we will put in the metrics. METHOD record_metric. TRY. zcl_prometheus=>set_instance_from_request( me->mo_request ). zcl_prometheus=>write_multiple( VALUE #( ( key = |hello_count{method=“{ i_method }”,status=“{ i_response }”}| value = ‘1’ command = zif_prometheus=>c_command-increment ) ( key = |hello_duration{method=“{ i_method }”,status=“{ i_response }”}| value = me->runtime->get_runtime( ) ) ) ). CATCH cx_root. ENDTRY. ENDMETHOD.

set_instance* methods will set the Shared Memory Area instance that you can see in the transaction SHMM. So you can use one instance for each application and the metrics can be kept and queried separately.

set_instance_from_request will set the instance from the root endpoint by default (i.e. hello) if not explicitly specified by instance attribute or query parameter.

There are three fields you need to pass when you want to record metrics (via write* methods)

* key is the metric name and its label according to Prometheus data model and metric naming convention.
* value is the value to record
* command is optional and is ‘overwrite’ by default. Using increment will add value to the current so you don’t need to read and write on your own.

Surround the method with try…catch… so this codes will (almost) never break your application.

Then you call this method at the end of each API.

For example: METHOD if_rest_resource~get… . record_metric( i_method = mo_request->get_method( ) i_response = cl_rest_status_code=>gc_success_ok ). ENDMETHOD.

Creating the metrics endpoint

Next, you need an endpoint for Prometheus server to call and grab the metrics data.

In REST handler class (ZCL_REST_HANDLER), insert the following routing string in the method if_rest_application~get_root_handler. lo_router->attach( iv_template = ’/hello/metrics’ iv_handler_class = zcl_prometheus_rest_resource=>c_class_name ).

Testing your endpoint

Open your browser and open your /hello/metrics endpoint. You should see a blank page.

Try using your application so the metrics are recorded.

In case you’re using Postman to test the APIs you can import my Postman files from here.(Please note Postman is a commercial product but there’s a free version available)

After one GET and one POST request, refresh the metrics page and you should start seeing the data.

Now, your application is ready to be monitored

Setting up Prometheus Server

Installing Prometheus

Download Prometheus from this page. Extract the package and you can run the executable without installing.

Note: If you want to install as a window service, you can use NSSM.

Open browser and go to http://localhost:9090. and you should see its web UI.

Adding a new job to monitor your application

Now, your Prometheus server does not yet recognize your application so you need to configure it first.

Edit the file prometheus.yml and add the following lines: – job_name: npl-test params: sap-client: [‘001’] sap-language: [‘EN’] metrics_path: /test/hello/metrics basic_auth: username: DEVELOPER password: yourpassword static_configs: – targets: – vhcalnplci.dummy.nodomain:8000

In your secured environment, you may want to use HTTPS like this: – job_name: npl-test scheme: https params: sap-client: [‘001’] sap-language: [‘EN’] metrics_path: ’/test/hello/metrics’ basic_auth: username: DEVELOPER password: yourpassword tls_config: insecure_skip_verify: true static_configs: – targets: [‘vhcalnplci.dummy.nodomain:44300’]

Please note that you should add one job for each application server. Don’t use load balance URL as the metrics are bound for each application server. Go to transaction SM51 to see the list of all application servers on the system.

After saving, restart the service and access the web UI. Query for up metric and click Execute. If your job is setup properly, you should see the value 1.

You may try querying your application metric e.g. hello_count.

Setting up Grafana

Prometheus is good at collecting and querying time series data but to have a better a visualization you may need Grafana.

Grafana Sample Dashboard

What is Grafana?

Grafana is a tool for data visualization & monitoring with support for Graphite, InfluxDB, Prometheus, Elasticsearch and many more databases. In short, Grafana will pull the data from Prometheus and visualize them on their dashboard web interface.

We setup a desktop PC with two monitoring screens and put it where the team can see easily.

Installation

Download from here. Extract and run it the same way you do for Prometheus.

Setting up data source

First, we need to setup Grafana to recognize Prometheus server.

Go to http://localhost:3000 and log in with default username and password (i.e. admin:admin). Select Data Source from the menu and click Add Data Source. Fill in the connection to your Prometheus server like below:

Setting up dashboard

We’re going to setup 2 graphs to monitor API usage count and response time.

Select Dashboards from the menu, click Home and click + New Dashboard.

Select Graph. Click the graph title and select Edit.

On tab General, name your graph title as you wish.

On tab Metrics, you will specify which metric data will be displayed on this graph. Fill in hello_count and put {{method}} ({{status}}) in Legend format.

On tab Axes, you can customize the graph axes.

Once done customizing, click Back to dashboard on the top-right.

Click + ADD ROW to add a new row and create a new graph.

Configure tab Metrics with hello_duration with the same Legend format.

Configure tab Axes like this:

Once done, you should see your dashboard like this.

Don’t forget to set the time range and refresh rate so your monitor screen keeps refreshing with the latest data.

Try to use your application and see how the graph reflect. http://bit.ly/2EtCKnO #SAP #SAPCloud #AI