Troubleshooting AS2: Communications or Configuration error?

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Errors from inbound AS2 communications can be very difficult to figure out.  I’d like to discuss how to tell whether the issue is coming from Sterling B2B Integrator, or from outside of the product.

First, some basics:

When AS2 data is transmitted, it is always sent by a trading partner.

The sender initiates the transmission.  The receiver just waits for it

to arrive.

If you are using Sterling B2B Integrator, your data must be sent from

your partner to your HTTP Server Adapter.  Further, it must be sent to

the URI for AS2 traffic.  If your partner sends data to you, they'll

send to an end point with this format:

   http://my-server:PORT/URI

For example:

   http://ibm.com:1234/as2

In that example, "/as2" is the URI.

When data is received properly to the "/as2" URI, it will run a

business process in Sterling Integrator called "EDIINTParse".  If that

process was kicked off, Sterling Integrator tried to process an

inbound transaction as AS2 data.

So, if there was a problem receiving a file sent by a partner, the

first thing to check is whether EDIINTParse has executed.

In the Sterling Integrator user interface, if you go to Business

Process > Monitor > Central Search and check for EDIINTParse, and

select Status of "Error", and set the Start Date for 2 days ago,

you will see any recent processes that failed.

Here is what the search screen looks like:

It might return 0 results, like this:

If you see this when you expected to receive data, please open a PMR.  There could be an issue with your perimeter server, network, load balancer, firewall, or an error from your partner's side.  We’ll be interested in what errors your partner is seeing, and in the PSLogger.log, perimeter.log, http.log and anything that has changed.

However, if you see something like this:

It indicates someone reached your system but ran into a configuration error.  Please look for further blog entries on Troubleshooting AS2.