You can achieve interface transparency on your IT-landscape with basically 2 approaches:
- Top-Down via Enterprise Architecture (e.g. LeanIX)
- Bottom-Up via Interface Management (WHINT Solutions)
Enterprise Architecture helps to get this transparency from planning the application & interface landscape and more (top-down). You define your inventory of all IT assets and plan the IT transformation. But there are also challenges with this approach as the reality is only reflected as precisely as humans are updating the landscape.
Interface Management is not coming from a plan, but from the as-is situation (bottom-up). A key concept is to automate as much as possible and build an inventory/catalog of all interfaces [1] (from different runtime components of the integration layer/platform), generate a technical documentation [2], provide performance monitoring reports [3] and checks [4] as well as alerts for errors and anomalies [5].
With our recent update for WHINT Interface Documentation, you are able to get the best of both approaches for your technical interface documentation for SAP Cloud Integration: Planned from Enterprise Architecture and updated from the Interface Management as-is situation:
How it works:
Interfaces which are maintained in LeanIX, can be updated with a documentation link to SharePoint, where the documents get automatically generated (periodically) by WHINT. To achieve this link, you only have to enter the name or id of an SAP Cloud Integration iFlow as the external id of an interface in LeanIX. This is the only manual step.
Then our integration runs, checks all existing iFlows on SAP Cloud Integration and whether they exist in LeanIX. If yes, the fact sheet gets a link to the document in SharePoint (as a resource). If not, they will be listed in an e-mail which is a todo for the EA team to either add the interface or maintain the external id accordingly.
