When setting up SAP Integration Suite, configuration doesn’t end with creating a service instance.
To enable secure communication between systems, you also need a service key. This small but essential step provides the credentials required for authentication and ensures that sender systems can connect properly using OAuth. In this post, we’ll walk through how to create a service key and understand what information it contains.
After creating the service instance of the SAP Process Integration runtime service, you must create a service key for this instance. To do so, open the menu of the previously created instance by clicking on the ellipsis button in the instance overview and selecting the Create ServiceKey option.
You must assign a unique Service Key Name. Click the Create button to initiate the creation of the service key.
After creating the service key, view it in the service instance details in the Service Keys area. Open the service key by clicking it.
The figure below clearly shows that the service key is in JSON format. It contains all the details that a sender system needs to authenticate itself using OAuth. These include the clientid, clientsecret, url, and tokenurl. You can view the service key again later.
Creating a service key is a straightforward but critical step in configuring SAP Integration Suite. It acts as the secure bridge between your integration runtime and external sender systems by providing the necessary OAuth credentials. Once generated, the service key can be accessed whenever needed, making it easy to reference authentication details without recreating them. With this configuration complete, your integration setup is ready to support secure, authenticated communication.
Editor’s note: This post has been adapted from a section of the book Configuring SAP Business Technology Platform: The Practical Guide for Administrators by Martin Koch and Siegfried Zeilinger. Martin is the managing director of CloudDNA GmbH, an SAP partner in Austria. Siegfried is a freelancer and managing director of a small management consultancy.
This post was originally published 2/2026.