3338885 - Event Subscription Management: Troubleshooting and FAQ

This is a working document which aims to provide answers to common questions on the new Event Subscription Management tool as well as guidance on troubleshooting tips.

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SAP SuccessFactors Event Subscription Management

With the 2H 2022 Release, SAP SuccessFactors announced a new tool, Event Subscription Management, with the aim to replace Event Notification Subscription (cf. WNV announcement INT-14367).

Troubleshooting

Q1. Where can I find documentation on Event Subscription Management?
A1.
Guide: Using Admin Center
WNV Announcement INT-15303 - Enhancements to Event Subscription Management 

Q2. Where can I find the deprecation announcement of the Event Notification Subscription and/or the SEB External Event Tab?
A2. WNV Announcement PLS-30677 - Deprecation of SEB External Event Tab in Event Notification Subscription
NOTE: After internal discussions, please note the actual deletion of "SEB External Event" will happen during the 1H 2024 (b2405) Major Upgrade, our technical writing teams are working on updating the documentation.

Q3. What will happen with the existing subscriptions in the SEB External Event Tab/Event Notification Subscription?
A3. Subscriptions from Event Notification Subscription application will be automatically migrated to the new tool Event Subscription Management, there is no action required by the customer.
NOTE: we have limitation on the number of subscriptions per event in the new tool Event Subscription Management (maximum 6 subscriptions). This limit is based on the production data collected during testing and planning.

Q4. How is this announcement linked to External Event Notifications?
A4. External Event Notifications (EEN) is considered an old framework and is being replaced by the new Integration Gateway Service (IGS)
As part of this shift, we are deprecating the old tool Event Notification Subscription in favor of Event Subscription Management.
NOTE: The user guide about the old framework still exists as there are some other use cases for which it will still be valid, at least in the long to mid term.
This announcement, as explained in the External Event Notifications User Guide, is specific to third-party subscriptions for Intelligent Services and external notifications:
“Use the Event Subscription Management tool to configure your third-party subscriptions for Intelligent Services, and the Event Notification Audit Log to monitor your external notifications.”

Q5. The old tool Event Notification Subscription had a manual re-trigger option, is there an equivalent in Event Subscription Management? 
A5. For 401/403 errors, no automatic retry will happen, only manual retry is available. Please note that the manual retry functionality has been moved to Admin Alerts --> Domain Event 
Automatic retries will happen for certain exceptions such as "Service unavailable" or "Endpoint down", specifically:

A) If there is a SOAP fault returned by the Webservice
B) If the Webservice returns a response as per the structure specified in the WSDL and it has a non-empty value in the errorCode or errorMessage fields (note that non-empty errorCode/errorMessage were an indication of a failure even in the old framework). 

NOTES:
- The retention period for the Events in Admin Alerts is 7 days. 
- The schedule of automatic retries is as follows: 1 immediate and 9 retries at an interval of 3 hours. After all the retries, if still failed it will also go to Admin Alerts, from where it can be manually retried.

Q6. The event Audit log moved to the Execution Manager and the response payload is no longer visible (this was visible in the old event Audit logs, e.g. reason for failure, response text), can you comment on this?
A6. The error messages have been improved in the Execution Manager for failure cases. Also, Execution Manager shows details like EventId, type of event, business keys, etc.  If you feel more fields are required to be shown in Execution Manager, please provide your business case for this via an Enhancement Request.

Q7. It seems exception handling is different in the old tool v. the new one Event Subscription Management, can you give a little background on this?
A7. The older application Event Notification Subscription allowed all kinds of responses (Invalid, Null, etc.). The framework behind the new tool Event Subscription Management (Integration Gateway Service, aka IGS) adheres to the standard response handling. This means that when the response handling results in an exception, an automatic retry kicks in and happens for nine consecutive times.

Q8. In a third-party scenario (ISC <> BTP/CPI), it appears that, even if the event is successful to the third-party event subscriber (SAP BTP/CPI), the event is still retriggering.
A8. Please provide  “event ids” or “Business keys” (both available in XM) to SAP's Product Support for troubleshooting purposes.

Q9. Can you give some examples on exceptions which are now captured by IGS?
A9. See table below:

Q10. Is there any difference in the handling of field "status" between the old framework and the new one? (this is relevant in Employee replication scenarios, for example Employee Hire)
A10. An event is considered failed only if either the errorCode or the errorMessage field is non-empty. It does not consider the value of the “status” field. Please note this behavior is the same in both the old and new frameworks.

Q11. What is considered as valid SOAP response? 
A11.

1. The SOAP response body must follow structure as per WSDL defined in https://help.sap.com/docs/SAP_SUCCESSFACTORS_PLATFORM/e85fac4e6a3b4884b6451d4208cdb778/831b49a8e894455a93f24b1071a0b28e.html?source=redirect
2. The “Content-Type” header in SOAP response must be a valid XML content type.

Examples of valid Content-Type:

text/xml

application/xml

application/soap+xml

application/atom+xml

Q12. Can you provide some background information in relation to system Refreshes? How will this change impact any existing configurations?
A12. During an instance refresh, the configurations are not copied from source to target, this is standard practice across our application.
If your concern is that any configurations that existed in the target system were not restored after a refresh, then please note there is a daily migration job running to move these configurations from EEN to IGS.
For any concerns in relation to the refresh itself, please reach out to the Platform team at LOD-SF-PLT.

Q13. One of our environments has not been switched from Event Notification Subscription to Event Subscription Management but all the other ones have - why is that?
A13. The switch is being done in a phased manner so as not to lose any events which may already be in the queue. Our background job runs frequently and only when there are no events in the queue, the migration will happen (see also A12. above)

Q14. Will the data under “Subscriber” tab in the Event Notification Subscription page be deleted/migrated? 
A15. This migration will not migrate/delete the record as the “subscriber” is not considered by/valuable to IGS.
Please note we are planning to delete the whole table once “RCM Alert” is deprecated or migrated in the future (there is no ETA on this, cf. Q4 above)

Q16. I am getting an error You must add at least one new Notification Subscription. when trying to delete a subscription in the SEB tab of Event Notification Subscription



A16. This is expected. The error warns you that if you delete the subscription in the snapshot, the topic Change in Employee Location will be empty, which is not allowed in our system. You must delete the entire topic from the left menu and then go to Event Notification Management UI to add it again if needed.

 



Q15. *STRICTLY INTERNAL*
Q15a) What keywords can we use to research the relevant Error Code?
A15a) Use the following string
index=msc_integration_gateway_svc 
<companyID> AND < CPI Process e.g. https://XXX.euxx.hana.ondemand.com/http/NameofEvent> AND IGS_EVENT_PROCESSING_AUDIT_DETAIL | table eventAuditDetails.errorInfo, eventAuditDetails.destinationLatency


Q15b) Where can I get a walk-through of this new tool?
A15b) Go to Integrations' Internal Work Zone page on the topic, direct URL here.

External
3339230 -  401/403 error codes in SOAP environments 
2090228 - How to Submit Ideas for SAP SuccessFactors Products 
Event Subscription Management Guide - Adding and Managing Event Subscriptions 
Implementing and Managing Intelligent Services
KBA 3319657 - SAP SuccessFactors Integrations Release FAQ – First Half 2023 (1H 2023)
Solving Admin Alerts

Internal
IGS Guardrails 

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