SAP BTP Cockpit: Get Started with SAP BTP

Hi, and welcome back to our YouTube series on SAP business technology platform.

Today we will focus on the SAP BTP Cockpit, looking at using the services, how to navigate sub accounts, entitlements and much more.

I'm joined here with Riley Rainey from the SAP Developer Relations team.

Hey Alison, Hi Riley.

I guess first off, what is the BTP Cockpit?

Can you tell us a bit about it and when, when should we be using it?

Sure. So BTP Cockpit is the starting point for really all the actions that you will perform when you're interacting with SAP business technology platform.

It provides the administrative tools to organize your accounts, to organize security, to start up the different services, and keep tabs on the runtime status of all of those.

Really everything that you're going to do to configure your environment is going to be done using BTP.

Some of your development is going to happen in other places and we'll talk about that a little bit later.

But it's really the central starting point for everything.

So BTP Cockpit is really where it all starts.

Absolutely. So what should we look at first?

So let me share my screen and I'll bring up a few things and we'll, we'll look at a number of different sub facets to this.

We're not going to cover absolutely everything here, but it'll give you a pretty good taste of what's going on.

When you sign up for an SAP BTP account through say, the free tier trial or you get an a commercial account.

One of the first things that you'll get as a welcome email which will direct you through a URL to your SAP BTP Cockpit.

And this introduces an important basic concept here, that Cockpit that you'll be directed to through that email is to a top-level entity that we call a global account.

And that's what we're actually looking at here.

Now I've populated a few things within this and I'll talk through a little bit of that.

But we're, again, we're not gonna get into a tremendous amount of detail here.

But each global account will have one or more sub accounts.

Now the global account you can think of is just the collecting place for where the action happens.

The action is going to actually happen in those sub accounts for these become places to isolate your work.

Isolate a particular set of applications, have a unique set of permissions.

And again, it's where the stuff will really actually occur.

The Global Account sort of organizes it all into a place that associates those things with you.

Great.

So we can see the Cockpit, we can see the global account.

And you did mention sub accounts.

Can you show us how to create a sub account?

Absolutely. It's really simple.

Right up here in this button is create and I select sub account, and I'm presented with a little dialogue here.

Let's let's say that I wanted to create an account here in the US.

And that's an important part of sub accounts, right?

The idea here is that because this is running in the Cloud and this is a particular environment, a sub account has a particular affinity with a particular, what we call SAP BTP region.

The Probably a really simple way to think about that is that as a particular datacenter and that's typically associated with a hyperscaler vendor like AWS or Azure.

I have a drop-down here that allows me to select which one of those, but there's also some other help that you can go to That's pretty handy as well.

If you go back to Discovery Center that we were looking at in the earlier video, if you go over to the services display and click on this Learn More button.

In addition to some of the instructional videos, it's got a great map sitting right here.

And this gives you a geographical overview of where these different datacenters are.

They're color-coded by AWS, Azure and so on.

So all the different hyperscalers are there.

And one of the reasons again, for picking a particular region might be that you might have a particular group of users on a particular continent, in a particular regional area.

And by selecting a datacenter, a region that's closer to those folks, your response time is minimized.

So let me go back to that and here's the region drop-down.

I said I wanted to create this in the US.

So I'll select that.

Usaid va, Everything else I can default here.

I click on the Create button and it's simple as that.

This will be created.

And of course, there's a number of steps going on in the background while this is happening, while we're talking here.

But at the end of that process, I have a brand new, almost completely empty sub account.

We'll talk about why I said almost here in just a second.

Ready for my use and ready for configuration.

Great, So now that we've gone over global account, so the accounts and now that we've seen this empty sub account, what happens next?

So a few of the entities and terms that you're going to want to understand inside a sub account go like this.

Within a sub account, there actually are certain things that are considered to be intrinsic to the sub account.

And you see this list of things called entitlements.

These are different entities.

And again, this pre-populated list, you can think of these as just sort of intrinsic things.

These are things that you typically don't think about as front-and-center entities inside BTP, Log Management, auto-scaling and application.

You don't have to use each one of these, but they're common enough and really no cost associated with them that these are all available inside anytime I've created a sub account, you get those.

Now, as I start to want to do meaningful work within here, one of the first things that I'm going to think about is, well, what things do I need to add to this particular account to do something interesting?

So let's say back to again, the video that we did previously where we were talking about Discovery Center.

Let's say I went into that Discovery Center mission about what's a business application studio or something like that, which is a web-based development tool.

Let's say I wanted to add that based on the directions inside a mission that I was exploring to this mix.

The way that I would do that is I actually go back up to my global account because from a permissions point of view, all the permissions to do things flow from the global account down to some other lower-level entity?

The sub accounts is the first starting point for that.

So if I look in here at the global account, there's also an entitlements tab within here, but you see two sub buttons.

The service assignments shows me what's already there, but it's giving me because I'm at the global account, a global view of all of this.

What I'm using across all my different sub accounts.

If I want to assign something to that particular sub account, I need to assign it to it as an entity.

So I click on entity assignments and then I would select the name of that new sub account that I created USA.

Click Select. And now it's gonna give me a view of those same things that I was just looking at.

But what's different about the picture here is there's also this button configure entitlements.

So as an administrator, I can now say, okay, for this particular sub account, I'm going to entitle the people who are using that particular sub account to run something, do something, whatever that is.

And we're talking about services and service plans here.

So again, the hypothetical task that I was going to take on here was to add Business Applications studio.

I click on the Add Service Plans button.

And within this is the list of all the different services.

This is going to map almost exactly, in fact, it does to the services catalog that we saw back in Discovery Center, right?

If I go down here because I know where it is, I go to SAP Business Application studio and click on that.

You'll notice that it shows available plants.

This is another sort of a sub entity to a service.

Anytime a service is available and made available by SAP, there's gonna be different service plans associated with that.

In some cases, it's just the difference between using something for free and actually paying for it, right?

In this particular case, because I'm doing a Discovery Center mission.

This is a really low investment thing.

I wanna do it for free.

I'll click on free here.

I could click on the Standard Edition and use something like this in the same way, but in production with less restrictions.

If you're interested in understanding which restrictions are there, you can go back to the Discovery Center service listings and you can see the difference of what capabilities might be different in each one of these.

There's also some services that have specific tiers of service.

There's different sizes of haunted databases, things like that, that I can select here too.

And of course, there's different costs associated with selecting larger and larger services here.

So here, if I select Add one service, what I've actually done is after I click the Save button there, this is now I go down here and I see SAP Business Application Studio.

One other thing to keep in mind, and another step that's implied by this process is the sub account now has been assigned one unit of business application studio.

So I can now run business application studio for however many users that free plan supports.

It's more than one user by the way.

But I haven't actually started using it yet.

To start using it, I would actually go back to the sub account.

Visit that sub account here.

We'll get the entitlements that I was just looking at.

But here from this sub account point of view.

And within business application studio, I can now start that service.

And once it's, once it's enabled, I can actually start using it.

So all of those steps are involved.

The mission will actually take you through each of those individual steps that I was just talking about.

You're not left to your own devices on any of this.

But understanding that flow of how entitlements are doled out from the global account into sub accounts and then enabled for each one is an important aspect to remember in the flow and the fact that you're running in a production account.

Great, So now that we've enabled the service, how do I get a global overview of what my service usage is?

That's a good question.

So there's at the global account level, there's your usage analytics tab.

Within this, I get that high level view that you're talking about.

I have three sub accounts.

I'm in two different geographical regions.

And you'll notice here one of the services that's listed is business application studio.

It'll show me a summary of all the different usage if there's particular plan limits on this.

And of course, I haven't really been doing a lot within this particular a global account.

But I can see my consumption if there's particular limits to that.

I can see how close to the limits I am.

Gives you a great overview in a number of different ways of a lot of different data that's gonna give you that system administrator or system auditors point of view of what's going on inside my global account and all the different sub accounts.

Great.

What would be the next important element we should look at within the BTP Cockpit.

So That's a good question.

We talked about sub accounts being environments.

A key aspect of the environments, as I touched on earlier, was this is how we dole out access permissions for individual users.

So it might be interesting to explore a little bit of that.

I'll start by going to the global account.

And you see the security on the left-hand side here.

One of the first basic elements of this is that if I want to add users to be able to do something at a global account level.

I can add them right here.

I click on Create.

I do it by e-mail address.

So I'm just going to put in a bogus email address.

Same email address here for the ID.

I'll talk more about it in just a second.

But you see this drop-down for identity providers.

All I need to maybe tell you about that right now is that an important aspect of BTP is we want to interoperate with your corporate identity service, whatever that is.

If you're running as a business.

And very often people will have cloud-based identity providers, maybe something on-premise.

In the Cloud like Azure AD Cloud.

We provide the SAP ID service and SAP universal ID.

And part of that is when you get your initial account, that default identity provider that comes with it.

It's actually the SAP IID service.

So if I stay with that and I don't add an identity provider early on and anything that I'm exploring.

And really, unless you're really focused on identity services, there's really no need to change any of this.

But you will need to have that huge user that you want to add here, register, say with SAP community or something like that so that they're known to the SAP ID service.

And then once they've done that, I create them here and they will be able to do certain tasks.

Now I haven't given them any access rights here.

And that sort of what takes us to the next level. With all of this.

Within this, the actions that I can perform is to actually add access rights to a particular user.

And that introduces a new concept here, There's a thing called a roll collection.

And if I look at my own account first, you see one of the things that's assigned to me just out of the box.

I don't have to do anything on my slides that I'm assigned as the owner of this particular global account, a role collection that's titled Global Account Administrator.

So that gives me access to do things like what I'm doing right now of adding users, configure any of these things that we've discussed up to this point.

If I wanted to do the same to that user that I just added, and I'm not gonna go through the full thing here.

I could edit that user and add that.

Now I'm not gonna do this in this, in this particular case.

But what I will show you is those role collections are actually associated with global accounts and sub accounts.

So here we have the list of the global account level.

Role collections to do particular tasks.

And basically, what this amounts to is I'm doing some exploration of SAP process automation.

So this IRP developer is one that I added, but these two, they came intrinsically out of the box.

We're administrator and viewer.

You can think of that as read-only access versus read write access at this global account level.

But similarly, if you go to the sub accounts, what you're going to see is that let me go to one where there's a little bit of action going on.

So you see a little bit richer view here.

In this particular sub account, I've actually been playing around with SAP process automation.

So I've turned on some of those services.

Anytime I turn on some of the services that might come with particular roles that need to be exposed through those role collections.

Or if I'm creating an application myself, I can actually define the roles and role collections that are associated with read access, right access, really any rights that I'm defining for the app, I'm in the driver's seat at that point.

But if I look at the role collections for this particular sub account, you'll notice that this list is much richer, right?

There's all these different tasks, Cloud Connector administrators, citizen developer, that's something associated with the configuration of SAP process automation.

There's some others that are associated with tasks that, again, are sort of out-of-the-box tasks but only associated with sub accounts as opposed to global accounts.

The point here is that as IT administrator at someone with administrative rights, I can go in and do all these out to the appropriate individuals and that user display here, you'll notice that by default, I've been added because I was the administrator of this account.

I have rights in this sub account.

I'm the person who created it, but no one else does.

And this is where I would create a user.

I'd add that user.

They, they may or may not be listed at the global account level because maybe I don't want to give them access there.

But I can add that same user down here, give them the appropriate rights.

And if this profile and layout is different than other sub accounts, you kinda get the idea of how different users could have different levels of access in different sub accounts and how you get that security hierarchy and isolation of access.

Great, That's a really great explanation of how to add users and the role collections.

Is there anything else within the SAP BTK p Cockpit that you wanted to share with us before we wrap up?

Not really. I think that we've covered a lot of the really high-level concepts.

One thing that I would say is if you're looking for more information about this specific setup steps that you'd want to go through to be set up to run missions in general.

Definitely go back, as we mentioned in that earlier video, to Discovery Center and go to the BTP setup mission.

That's the very top most leftmost mission that you're going to see in that list.

Nearly everybody goes through that.

What this will do is take you through a guided view, through a number of the steps that I went through, sort of ad hoc here.

But it'll get you set up to run almost any mission very, very easily, saves you a lot of time and also give you some reinforcement of what we just looked at here.

Great. Thanks Riley.

There are a lot of features to explore within the cockpit.

But I think Riley, you've gone through a good understanding of the essential elements for our initial exploration.

Like Riley mentioned, be sure to check out the YouTube playlist for the Discovery Center video.

Find missions that will enable you to gain hands-on experience within the cockpit.

To learn more about SAP BTP, you can go to sap.com/btp

and sign up today to start using it for free.

If you have any questions about the SAP Cockpit or BTP in general, please feel free to drop them in the comments below.

And with that, thanks.

Thanks again, Riley and have a great day, everyone.

You bet.