New release of the Cloud Connector (v.2.11.)

[MatthieuPelatan]

The team of the Cloud Connector has just released a new version of the Cloud Connector (2.11). As always you can download it for free from the tools.hana.ondemand.com page and upgrade your existing Cloud Connector to benefit from the many new features. Have a look at the official documentation if you need more info on how to upgrade.

Backup & Restore

One of the main new features is the option to export the complete configuration of your Cloud Connector. The version 2.11 provides now a backup mechanism that allows you to save everything so that you can easily restore it in case of loss. Once you upgraded your Cloud Connector, you will see 2 new buttons in the upper right corner of the UI, near to the existing "Add Subaccount" button.

For security reasons, you will be prompted to enter a password before you can export the archive. Some files with sensible data will be then protected by the entered password. You will need it also by restoring the configuration from the backup file. Be aware that when you restore a configuration, the Cloud Connector will restart automatically and all sessions will be terminated.
More details in the official documentation.

REST APIs

In the last release (2.10), we have introduced a first set of monitoring APIs that allows you to include monitoring information in your own monitoring tool like the SAP Solution Manager. With the version 2.11, we want to continue providing more APIs. Now you have also a first version of configuration REST APIs that lets you automate the essential parts of the Cloud Connector: initial configuration, management of subaccounts and configuration of your access control. Here is an overview of the available APIs:

High availability settings	Read settings Edit settings
Proxy settings	Read settings Edit settings
Authentication settings	Read authentication settings Edit authentication settings Edit LDAP authentication settings
Solution management configuration	Get solution management configuration Turn on reporting Turn off reporting
Backup	Create backup configuration Restore backup configuration
Subaccounts	Get list of subaccounts Create subaccount Delete subaccount Edit subaccount Connect or disconnect subaccount Extend validity of subaccount Create or change recovery subaccount Delete recovery subaccount Extend validity of recovery subaccount Read subaccount configuration
Access Control	Get list of system mappings Create system mapping Delete system mapping Delete all system mappings Edit system mapping Read system mapping
System mapping ressources	Get list of system mapping resources Create system mapping resources Delete system mapping resources Edit system mapping Read system mapping
Domain mappings	Get list of domain mappings Create domain mappings Delete domain mappings Edit domain mappings
Subaccount service channel	Get list of service channels Create service channel Delete service channel Edit service channel Enable or disable service channel

More details in the official documentation.

Bonus:You want to test the new APIs without spending too much efforts on it? No problem! My colleague philipp.stehle has created a nice tool to test them. Have a look at his blog if you want to know more about it

Managing regions

If you want to connect a subaccount to your on-premise landscape, you need to select a region in the dialog, that appears after clicking on "Add Suaccount". You can now select the subaccount region from the list of regions, instead of choosing the technical region host.

More details in the official documentation.

 

You can also define custom regions, if new regions are introduced and you want to use them before the next Cloud Connector release. In order to add a custom region that is not available in the selection of standard regions, go to Configuration > Cloud > Custom Regions and add the desired region.

More details in the official documentation.

Configuration of tunnel connections

The new version of the Cloud Connector helps you to better optimize the performance of your applications and the efficiency of your resources. Now you have 2 different options to specify the number of physical connections (per application) based on your needs:
1. You can edit the global parameters for tunnel connections that represent the maximal number of tunnel connections per application. From the Cloud Connector main menu, go to Configuration > Advanced to change the value in the Connectivity section.

2. Additionally, you can specify the number of allowed tunnel connections for each application. If you had specified a non-empty list of trusted applications, certainly all applications for which you want to specify a different connection count also need to be white-listed. Otherwise they won't be usable. From the Cloud Connector main menu, go to Cloud To On-Premise > Applications to change the value of the selected application.

More details in the official documentation.

Monitoring, audit logging and tracing

In the monitoring section, you can see details about the last 50 recent requests. Till now, you were able to view all requests or only the ones destined for a certain virtual host. A new filter option has been introduced in the version 2.11. In order to faster analyse the performance, you can further restrict the selection of the recents requests by filtering the resources. To do so, select the virtual host for which you want to specify the resource filter and choose one or more of the listed accessible resources.

More details in the official documentation.
Moreover, we are continuing to provide more APIs. With 2.11, an additional monitoring API provides a list of "top time consumers". Using this API, you can read the data of top time-consuming requests provided by the Cloud Connector performance monitor.
Last but not least, you can now configure an automatic cleanup for both audit logs and log/trace files. See Audit Logging and Troubleshooting.

More...

Of course the new version comes with more features and fixes 😉 You can check all the details in the release notes of the SAP Cloud Platform. Its' worth to have a look at it... for example you will see that we now provide JVM settings for the Cloud Connector and function module units are now supported when processing RFC requests that use tRFC, qRFC, or bgRFC on the cloud side.
The new release of the Cloud Connector comes with many cool new features, so don't wait too long and download it right now!
As always, I would be happy to hear what you think about it. So don't hesitate to send your feedback or even questions in the comments section.
Thanks.

 

[former_member62036]

Excellent blog....

 

[pjcools]

Nice matthieu.pelatan thanks for sharing the update. Just downloading now and will check it out.

 

Thanks!

[SamueleBarzaghi]

Thanks!

[pranav]

Superb... This is extremely insightful 🙂

A follow-up question for the Monitoring capability - is there a possibility to sort/ rank list of connections for a particular account based on their usage ? To be more specific, over time we end up having several mappings (Cloud to On-Premise) some of which get obsolete. Such a ranking would help identify "unused" connections and hence can be cleaned up periodically ? (maybe a further extension of "most recent requests" feature).

 

Thanks a ton.

[MatthieuPelatan]

Hi Pranav,

thanks for your input.

Can you please tell me appr. how many access controls you have per account?

Best,

Matthieu

[BCCR]

 

Hi Matthieu,

I need to upgrade my old versión 2.10.1 to a newest versión, but tho old versión do nota have a backup option. How do I have to do for no lost my configuration?

 

Thanks

Regards

Ali

[JaySchwendemann]

Hi matthieu.pelatan ,

thanks for the valuable information. I have a question regarding the configuration of tunnel connections.

We use Cloud Connector für C4C –> CPI –> Cloud Connector –> ERP flow. The protocol is HTTP. We recently had the situation, where an unwanted mass data change in C4C blocked quite a few dialog processes in ERP backend.

We know, we could mitigate impact using e.g. “rdisp/rfc_min_wait_dia_wp” parameter in ERP. However, there’s also “rdisp/scheduler/prio_low/max_quota” which would give us opportunity to fine tune this (https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/2129291)

1. Is tunnel worker threads or process worker threads even applicable to HTTP or does it only apply to RFC
2. What are the differences of the two. The documentation https://help.sap.com/viewer/cca91383641e40ffbe03bdc78f00f681/Cloud/en-US/f9111c8b58034bdcb848c24829c... is IMHO not that specific
3. If I get the gist of note 2129291 correctly, we would have priority class “normal” as we are HTTP (without UI). Would we be able to change this in any way, so that we can make use of rdisp/scheduler/prio_low/max_quota

Many thanks and kind regards

Jens