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Celonis Product Documentation

SAP extraction client for PI/PO and SAP 4.6C

These instructions are for installing the uplink-based on-premise SAP extraction client.

Tip

Unless you're using PI/PO or an older version of SAP 4.6C, you must install the SAP Extractor during the on-prem client installation process. Contact Support to get the SAP Extractor. See Installing on-prem clients.

System requirements

The on-premise server runs Celonis SAP extraction client and Celonis Automation client. For this we recommend the following system requirements:

Hardware

  • Virtual machine or physical server

  • CPU: Min. Intel Xeon processor with 4 Cores

  • RAM: min. 20 GB

  • Disk space: min. 110 GB on the tmp directory (the directory can be overridden as described here)

  • Location of the server needs to be in the same network as the source system(s) that should be connected

Software

  • 64-bit Operating System

    • Windows Server: recommended 2012 R2 (2008 R2 SP1 and later versions are also supported)

    • Ubuntu: recommended 18.04 LTS

    • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7

    • SUSE Enterprise Linux (SLES) 12 and 15

    • Oracle Linux 6 and 7

Network connectivity and access

Connections for operations of the extractor

Source System

Target System

Port

Protocol

Description

On premise extractor server

SAP ECC system

33XX (where xx is the system number)

TCP

RFC connection from on on-premise extractor server to the SAP system. The system number can be retrieved from the SAP basis team.

On premise extractor server

Celonis cloud endpoint

443

TCP

HTTPS connection from on-premise extractor server to Celonis cloud endpoint. The IPs of the endpoint depend on the cloud realm (which can be seen in the URL) and they can be found in the section below.

Cloud IP addresses depending on the realm

The IP of the realm where the Celonis Platform team resides should be allowlisted so that the on-premise extractor can communicate with the Celonis Platform cloud endpoints.

Optional: Using proxies

Please refer to the on premise Extractor documentation on proxies topic.

Installing the SAP extractor on Windows

Here's how to install the SAP extraction client using the uplink on Windows.

Step 1: Setting up the connection in Celonis Platform

  1. Go to Admin and Settings and select Uplink Integrations.

  2. Click Connect new system to create a new uplink connection.

  3. Give your new connection a name.

  4. Select Connector as the type of remote system no matter which Connector type you want to connect.

  5. Copy the keys and save them temporarily as they will be needed later in the manual process.

Step 2: Installing the extractor
Install the extractor using Windows installer

  1. Get the extractor package from Celonis Support.

  2. Run yyyy-mm-dd_SAP_Extractor_Agent_Installer.zip with admin rights, and click the Install button. The installer will check that a proper Java version is installed, and also automatically install the required Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 and 2013 Redistributable Packages.

  3. After successfully checking and installing the respective dependency libraries, the installer will prompt to install the Extractor. Click Next to proceed.

  4. In the next steps of the workflow please enter the Uplink credentials generated in the Set up the Connection in the Celonis Cloud => Admin and Settings step above, and then define the directory where the Extractor should be installed.

  5. After the installation is completed, the Celonis SAP Extractor service will be created in Windows Services, and the installation directory will be populated with the Extractor source files.

Install extractor manually

  1. Get the extractor package from Celonis Support.

  2. Add the copied keys to config file application-local.yml.

    Spacing in the configuration

    Please make sure not to change anything regarding the white spaces in the configuration file application-local.yml. The different elements need to be spaced exactly as in the original example.

    Change the following settings:

    • The file name after "file:" indicates the name of the log file into which the extractor writes. The file will be automatically created.

    • The following options need to be configured:

      • url: You need to adapt the team name - it should point to the team that the data should be send to - https://{team}.{cluster}.celonis.cloud/uplink/api/public/uplink

      • clientId: The client ID of the uplink endpoint that you have already set-up

      • clientSecret: The client secret of the uplink endpoint that you have already set-up

If you would like to use a proxy (optional), please refer to the proxy configuration page.

Step 3: Setting up the JCo

To establish a connection between Celonis Platform and SAP, you must download the SAP Java Connector (SAP JCo) library and place it in your local directory. SAP Jco allows applications to communicate with SAP systems using SAP's RFC protocol.o communicate with the Celonis RFC module, the Extractor needs to establish a connection to the SAP system and be able to make RFC calls. For this purpose, we use an industry-standard library - The SAP Java Connector (SAP JCo) - which is maintained and published by SAP itself. The JCo library should be downloaded and set up separately. This involves two steps:

  1. Download the respective package from the SAP Marketplace.

    Note

    Only SAP Service User (S User) can download software from SAP portals. Usually, a customer's SAP BASIS has this access.

    The downloaded SAP Jco folder already contains two files: a Java part “sapjco3.jar”, and an operating system-specific part e.g. sapjco3.[.dll | .so | .sl ].

  2. Copy the Library files directly into the external folder located at {installation_folder}/shared/libraries/external

    The Celonis Agent is configured to read the library from this directory.

    Note

    After setting up the SAP Jco, the Windows Service Celonis Agent needs to be restarted for the SAP Jco-related changes to take effect.

  3. Restart the Celonis Automation client:

    • On Windows:

      1. Go to the On-prem Client Management Tool.

      2. In tabs for the automation client and SAP extractor click Stop and then Start to restart both services.

    • On Linux, MacOS:

      1. Go to the On-prem Client Management Tool. In Terminal run:

        ./opc-management-tool-cli

      2. In tabs for the automation client and SAP extractor click Stop and then Start to restart both services.

Installing the SAP extractor on Linux

Here's how to install the SAP extraction client using the uplink on Linux.

Step 1: Setting up the connection in the Celonis Platform

  1. Go to Admin and Settings and then system/Uplink integrations.

  2. Click Connect new system to create a new uplink connection.

  3. Give your new connection a name.

  4. Select Connector as the type of remote system no matter which Connector type you want to connect.

  5. Copy the keys and save them temporarily as they will be needed later in the process.

Step 2: Downloading and configuring the extractor

  1. Get the extractor package from Celonis Support.

  2. Add the copied keys to config file application-local.yml (see the example below)

Spacing in the configuration

Please make sure not to change anything regarding the white spaces in the configuration file application-local.yml. The different elements need to be spaced exactly as in the original example.

Change the following settings:

  • The file name after "file:" indicates the name of the log file into which the extractor writes. The file will be automatically created.

  • The following options need to be configured:

    • url: You need to adapt the team name - it should point to the team that the data should be send to - https://{team}.{cluster}.celonis.cloud/uplink/api/public/uplink

    • clientId: The client ID of the uplink endpoint that you have already set-up

    • clientSecret: The client secret of the uplink endpoint that you have already set-up

If you would like to use a proxy (optional), please refer to the proxy configuration page.

Step 3: Setting up the JCo

To establish a connection between Celonis Platform and SAP, you must download the SAP Java Connector (SAP JCo) library and place it in your local directory. SAP Jco allows applications to communicate with SAP systems using SAP's RFC protocol.o communicate with the Celonis RFC module, the Extractor needs to establish a connection to the SAP system and be able to make RFC calls. For this purpose, we use an industry-standard library - The SAP Java Connector (SAP JCo) - which is maintained and published by SAP itself. The JCo library should be downloaded and set up separately. This involves two steps:

  1. Download the respective package from the SAP Marketplace.

    Note

    Only SAP Service User (S User) can download software from SAP portals. Usually, a customer's SAP BASIS has this access.

    The downloaded SAP Jco folder already contains two files: a Java part “sapjco3.jar”, and an operating system-specific part e.g. sapjco3.[.dll | .so | .sl ].

  2. Copy the Library files directly into the external folder located at {installation_folder}/shared/libraries/external

    The Celonis Agent is configured to read the library from this directory.

    Note

    After setting up the SAP Jco, the Windows Service Celonis Agent needs to be restarted for the SAP Jco-related changes to take effect.

  3. Restart the Celonis Automation client:

    • On Windows:

      1. Go to the On-prem Client Management Tool.

      2. In tabs for the automation client and SAP extractor click Stop and then Start to restart both services.

    • On Linux, MacOS:

      1. Go to the On-prem Client Management Tool. In Terminal run:

        ./opc-management-tool-cli

      2. In tabs for the automation client and SAP extractor click Stop and then Start to restart both services.

Using log files of the on-premise Extractor

If you encounter an error when starting or running the Extractor, it is very helpful to have a look at the log file that the Extractor produces. It can be found in the same folder as the Extractor and it has the name given in the configuration file (see above), by default <ConnectionType>_connector.log. Please also share this file with Celonis Support using the Support portal if you want to report an issue.

Running the SAP extractor

You can run the Extractor in the following ways:

Run the Extractor from the command line

Start the jar file by opening the terminal/cmd, navigating to the respective folder and running it with the following command:

 java -Xmx8g -jar connector_file_name.jar

Running multiple extractors

If you like to run multiple on premise extractors in the same folder, you need to rename the application-default.yml files so that they are distinct. Then you need to start the respective extractor with the following command:

 java -Dspring.config.location=configuration_file_name.yml -Xmx8g -jar extractor_file_name.jar
Running an on-premise Extractor as a service

The major benefit of running it as a service is that the Extractor can be automatically started when the server is rebooted.

On Linux

If you wish to start the application on startup of the server, you can use systemd - the standard way to start a Linux service at boot.

For this you need to create a unit file and put it in the directory /etc/systemd/system/. You can use this example unit file below named celonis_extractor.service:

celonis_extractor.service

[Unit]
Description=Celonis Extractor Service.

[Service]
Type=simple
User=username
WorkingDirectory=[path to folder of installation]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/java -Xmx8g -jar connector-sap.jar
Restart=on-abort

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

To enable and start the service execute the following commands.

Start the service

sudo systemctl start celonis_extractor.service # starts the service
sudo systemctl enable celonis_extractor.service # registers the service so that it is started on boot

On Windows

The Extractor package contains four files that enable you to run the Extractor as a Windows service:

  1. Celonis<ConnectionType>Extractor.xml: The configuration file of the service. Normally, you do not need to make any changes to this file.

  2. install.bat: The batch file to install the services on the service.

  3. startup.bat: The batch file to start the service manually.

  4. shutdown.bat: The batch file to stop the service manually.

In order to perform an install, a startup or a shutdown, you need to run the batch file as an administrator. To do that, simply right click on the respective file and then select "Run as administrator".

SAP extractor FAQs
"Connection refused: connect; nested exception is java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused: connect"

Check that your on-premise Extractor server can reach Celonis Platform. Specifically, please verify that:

  • you can reach the URL https://[team].[realm].celonis.cloud in the browser of your server - if not, please check your firewall settings;

  • no proxy is blocking the connection between the Extractor and Celonis Platform - if it is needed, see documentation about proxies.

When running the extractor as a Windows service, it fails and only the log files ending with wrapper are visible.

Please check that your Java version is 11 by typing the following in the command line:

java -version

If it is, please make sure that the environment variables PATH and JAVA_HOME are set on a system level, not on only a user level. Moreover, you need to restart your server after the environment variables have been changed so that it affects the system user as well.

Overriding the temp folder that is used by extractor for storing the files temporarily

This is possible to do by overriding the command that starts the extractor service:

For Windows

Windows service is installed according to the metadata that is defined in the file CelonisSapExtractor.xml, which is located in the extractor folder. You can modify the command line arguments there and override the directory which is by default "%BASE%\temp". For example, -Djava.io.tmpdir="%BASE%\define\your\directory".

For Linux

The same logic applies to Linux. You need to modify the command that launches the extractor service. When running the command make sure to explicitly override the temp folder. For example:

java -Djava.io.tmpdir="/define/your/directory" -Xmx8g -jar connector-sap.jar