Restarting Process Chains

Process chains can be restarted from within Redwood Server at Chain-level as well as on process level. This allows you to only restart the processes that require a restart without starting the whole Chain again. When a job of a process chain reaches an error state, the parent job of the process chain is put to console and an Operator Message is generated allowing you to restart the Chain at a desired point. You can choose to make a process chain restartable when you submit the process chain. There are three options:

  • the entire chain is restartable
  • only failed processes are restartable
  • the chain is not restartable

This is governed by the CHAIN_RESTARTABLE parameter on the SAP_BW_ProcessChainRun Process Definition. Once you have selected a restart option in the Operator Message, SAP_BW_RestartProcess or SAP_BW_RestartProcessChain are submitted for you, depending on your reply to the Operator Message. To restart process chains, you should first import and run a process chain, this is outlined in the Running Process Chains section.

Failed processes of monitored process chains can also be restarted, by default; this setting can be customized with Redwood Server registry entries, see the section below.

Restarting process chains requires the ProcessServerService.SAP.ProcessChainRestart license key.

Note: Please refer to SAP Note 1007419 and SAP Note 1059049 for further information on required Support Packages.

Process chains can also be restarted automatically, without human intervention. Although it is always best to have human intervention when something goes wrong, your process chain might only fail in a predictable manner, for example, when dependent data has not yet been processed. If this is the case, you can have one or more processes of your process chain restart a number of times after a certain delay, waiting for the data to be processed, for example. Each process can have different settings, delays and maximal restart counts.

Note: It is not possible to use Redwood Server to balance the load of process chains across SAP application servers. As far as scheduling is concerned, you can only influence the parent job. You can, however, restart certain child jobs.

Restarting Monitored Chains

By default, monitored BW chains have the restart option set to (F)ailed, this can be overridden using the following registry entries, the first applicable value will be used:

  • /configuration/sap/<Partition.SAPSystem>/bw/restart/RestartMode
  • /configuration/sap/bw/restart/RestartMode

Allowed values:

  • N - monitored BW chains are not restartable
  • F - monitored BW chains are restartable, only failed processes are shown (default)
  • A - monitored BW chains are restartable, all processes are shown

Note: This applies only to monitored BW chains, so those that were started in BW. BW chains started in Redwood Server have a parameter that defines the restart behavior.

Prerequisites

  • SAP System with all required Support Packages installed
  • Process chains have already been imported into Redwood Server

Procedure

Restarting a process chain from the console

  1. Expand the top-most parent process of the process chain, which has the status console.
  2. Locate the Operator Message Restart process chain? and choose reply from the context menu.
  3. Choose a level at which you want to restart the process chain and choose Save & Close.

Automatically restarting a process chain

  1. Navigate to "Environment > SAP".
  2. Choose Maintain Objects from the context menu of your SAP System.
  3. Expand Process Chains and choose the process you would like to restart automatically.
  4. Fill in Max Number Of Restarts as well as Restart Delay, change the Restart Delay Units if appropriate.
  5. Click Save & Close.

Result

In the first procedure, a copy of the process chain is created in the processes monitor, only the selected processes have been restarted; you can locate them under the failed processes.

In the second procedure, the process(es) you configured to restart automatically will be the next time you submit a process chain against that SAP System.

See Also