Integrations Support and Maintenance

Overview

During the lifecycle of the integration, both before and after the integration has been enabled in the production environment, it is often necessary to proactively monitor and support the integration to insure the data integrity is maintained and the integration is operating normally.

The customer, the Coupa Integrations Team, and the Coupa Success Team all play a part in insuring the reliability, quality, and ease-of-use for the running integration.

There are several areas that require continuous monitoring to insure the integrity of the integration.  The owner of the integration must insure that:

1. Integration Systems are available and running, and can accept data through the integration
2. Integration Service is running correctly
3. Integration Data is flowing between the integration endpoints successfully

All integrations are monitored through the Boomi Atomsphere UI.   Boomi has extensive documentation on how to view, manage and monitor their processes in the Boomi Atomsphere Documentation.   In addition to this, Coupa and the customer will generally become familiar with the following concepts below and what monitoring options are available to Coupa.

Integration Systems

Coupa

As part of Coupa's operational practices, every Coupa instance is continuously monitored for any impacts or degradation of services.  The Coupa Operations team will respond immediately to any service impacts and correct.

Customer Systems

Please monitor your system to the extent possible and notify Coupa support of any scheduled maintenances/outages or impacts to the integration endpoints by submitting a support case via the Coupa Support Portal.

Integration Service (Boomi)

All integrations run using the Boomi Atomsphere.  The Boomi platform (http://www.boomi.com/) is a highly reliable Cloud-based Integration-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform.  By using Boomi, all integrations automatically gain automatic alerting & monitoring on the integration service itself.  Any impacts to the integration service will immediately notify Coupa Operations staff who will diagnose and resolve the issue.

Integration Data

During any integrations, issues in data can sometimes occur where:

• Invalid data is provided according to system constraints which are present on one integration endpoint and not on the other, eg. a supplier name in Coupa must be globally unique, where other ERP systems may allow multiple suppliers to have many suppliers with the same name
• Data fields required on one side of the integration endpoint which are not present on the other, eg. an invoice in Coupa can have a blank Payment Term, but other ERP systems may require a payment term be present on each invoice.
• Data formats can be mismatched, eg. Coupa has a Supplier identifier field (Number) which can contain alphanumeric data, where a system may expect a numeric value for the unique Supplier identifier
• Reference data is not available or is in the wrong state, eg. an attempt to import an Invoice to Coupa fails because the Supplier does not exist in Coupa.  

In many cases, a manual reconciliation may be necessary to correct any missing or mismatched data between the 2 systems.

It is up to Coupa and the customer to work together collaboratively to identify the possible range of errors beforehand, and to insure that the appropriate resources are identified that can maintain and monitor the integrations issues over the lifespan of the integration, and deal with any data issues as they occur.

Integrations Error Handling

As part of our integrations process and throughout the integrations lifecycle, Coupa and the customer can participate in identifying most of the common errors that will occur in the integration.  Below is a template that can be used as a part of this process, which identifies the common error conditions, an explanation, how the alert will be generated, and which party will be the first responder for diagnosing the error.

Setting Up Email Alerts