Process Instances

Logging for the Process executions.

Basis to majority of Frends logging, Process Instances contain information what happened during a single integration execution. At top level the instances contain information about when Process was executed, did it succeed and how long it took, as well as any results of the execution.

Example view of Process Instance list.

Process Instance logs

You can view the Process execution and all its steps by opening any of the Process Instances from the list. On a default log level, all the results of each Process Task are logged into the Process Instance. This can be adjusted based on your needs to log more, including the input parameters for each Task and shape — or less, to focus solely on erroneous executions and save bandwidth, storage, and performance for the actual execution.

Process executions can be viewed from the Process Instance list, including the steps in the Process.

With the Process Instance open, it's possible to click and view the logged values for each shape in the Process. This allows for easy debugging and fast development, as well as a clear view for less technical personnel on what happened during each Process execution.

HTTP response for an API call shows the duration, response body as well as headers.

How much to log?

As a general rule, errors only log level is recommended for production to minimise storage and performance overhead, while the default level suits regular development. For debugging a specific issue, temporarily increasing verbosity to log everything logs all inputs and outputs and gives the clearest picture of what is happening.

The logged data is limited to 100 array entries or 8192 characters on default log level. For shapes handling very large data, consider skipping logging and promoting only a summary identifier instead.

Promoted values

Sometimes it is also useful to get more details about an execution directly into the Process Instance list. Promoted values can be used to do exactly this during development of a Process. When a shape in the Process is set to promote the result, the value for that shape will be shown on the Process Instance list, and the executions can then be searched and filtered by that value.

Promoted values work particularly well alongside the errors only log level — when general logging is reduced, promoted values ensure the identifiers you care about are still visible on every Process Instance, making it easy to find the specific executions that matter.

Advanced settings for shapes allow adjusting the logging behaviour for that shape alone.

Good candidates for promotion are low-cardinality identifiers such as order IDs, customer IDs, tracking numbers, and error codes — values that let you search and filter Process Instances by business meaning. Avoid promoting large payloads, as promoted values are always logged regardless of the log level setting and will add storage and performance overhead.

Skip logging

As an opposite to promoted value, it's also possible to set a shape to skip logging result and parameters. This is useful for hiding sensitive information, such as passwords, authentication tokens and social security numbers from the logs. While it reduces the ability to debug errors for those shapes, it increases the security of Process Instance logs.

It can also have positive implications for the performance, in case the amount of data for the shape is large. Not logging all of the data can be beneficial for storage and performance.

How to access Process Instances?

Process Instances can be accessed through the Process list for each Process and for each Environment. You can find more information about how to read Process Instance logs from this guide: How to view integration logs.