The world is changing, software evolves and the era of ordinary alert emails is also coming to an end. Welcome to Alerting 2.0! Starring SAP Cloud ALM, SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation and Microsoft Teams.

This blog will not explain how to connect SAP iRPA with SAP Cloud ALM. Check out the excellent expert portal for that one. It will neither explain how to build an automation. But it will show you some insights and hurdles we encountered during setup of our demo scenario.

SAP Cloud ALM

Identify the correct iRPA tenant
Sounds easy, but it is not. Looking at SAP Cloud ALM Landscape Management showed me multiple services could be identified when I was looking for “automation”.

There is only 1 source of truth: the tenant ID. Have a look at your automation subaccount to identify which one is relevant

Reflecting that tenant ID to Cloud ALM, there is only 1 relevant service. Please note the tenant ID could deviate from others, but that is OK.

Connection between SAP Cloud ALM and SAP iRPA
In this step, an end point must be defined facilitating the Operation Automation use case. During the demo setup, we identified 2 issues

• When you create an end point, the Root URL is predefined. But that value is not the correct one. Check the SAP iRPA Oauth JSON and use the “uri” parameter
• When the end point is created, you can immediately perform a connection test. Please note this test could throw an error stating an internal error.This is a bug in SAP Cloud ALM. Leave it as it. Product Management is aware and this one will be corrected in the near future.

Operation flow definition
Within Operation Automation, define the operation flow you want to use as a result of an alert. You can create 1 single operation flow covering different use cases. There is no need to separate them.

SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation

Create a destination
iRPA needs a destination to connect to SAP Cloud ALM. In the BTP Cockpit, you create a new destination with the specific name: sap_process_automation_cloud_alm.

Pay attention to 2 things

• Add property processautomationenabled and set its value to true
• Add “/oauth/token” at the end of the token service URL

Adding Cloud ALM in iRPA
After creating a destination, you can add it to the destinations in iRPA. Add a new destination and make sure you see it appearing in the list below. In this case the Cloud ALM destination with all environments.

Configure Cloud ALM in iRPA
If your destination is configured properly, you will see there is no text next to the “Configuration” title. Otherwise iRPA will mention that the destination is not found, as you can see in the image below.

Ensure your destination is correct before trying to proceed.
The service name you have to enter (1), is the same as your Tenant ID. The one you had to enter in SAP Cloud ALM.

If the registration succeeded, you will see 2 lists. Job Monitoring Configuration and Health Monitoring Configuration. Enable all the jobs and environments you want to have monitored by SAP Cloud ALM.

The end result

This is how it looks like in Microsoft Teams

Fully integrated and the message can be filled dynamically. The button Click here to view alert brings you directly to the alert information within SAP Cloud ALM.

Future improvements

• Currently there is nothing in Process Automation. The button “SAP Cloud ALM” is available in the configuration part. But there is nothing to do the configuration. Despite the fact Process Automation is the iPRA’s successor, nothing is available yet.
• At the moment there is little possible to retrieve data out of SAP Cloud ALM, from iRPA onwards. The analytics API is coming in Q2/2023. something to look forward to.

For both future improvements, keep a close eye on the roadmap!