Managing Integration Platform & Data

When there's more than a few Processes in your Frends Tenant and you would like to make sure everything is running as expected, you can use Dashboard to centrally monitor the Processes.

Step by Step Tutorial Available

If you prefer more visual or interactive guidance on how to use the Dashboard in Frends, you can find a step-by-step walkthrough from your own environment's home page, under Onboarding by selecting "Tutorial 2b, Step 1: Dashboard" tutorial.

What is Dashboard?

Dashboard is a comprehensive tool within the Frends Control Panel designed to provide users with a clear and concise overview of their system activities. It includes key metrics such as performance statistics and integration execution logs. The Dashboard offers customizable widgets that allow users to tailor the view according to their specific monitoring needs. Users can adjust settings to highlight critical alerts, track error occurrences, and monitor execution counts, thus enabling proactive management and swift response to any issues that may arise.

Accessing Dashboard

To find the Dashboard, click on your profile name in upper right corner, and select Dashboard from the opening menu.

You can also get a quick access by creating a bookmark pointing at yourtentant.frendsapp.com/Dashboard.

Monitor Process execution counts

Sometimes the count of executions is the most important detail to monitor. This can be required in order to manage and allocate resources to Frends Agents, set up more Agents to High Availability configuration, or simply to see how your business is doing.

Dashboard provides a couple widgets to let you see and monitor execution counts in your Frends Tenant. Successful processes shows you a daily execution count for successful executions, while Failed processes widget can be used to monitor specifically errors. They can also be adjusted to display the count from multiple days if required. They will also show the change from last time period when compared to currently ongoing counter.

More versatile and detailed widget for monitoring execution counts is the Process execution graph, which will show you a graph of execution counts for each point in time, for the chosen time period. The smaller the time period chosen, more detailed the graph will become. For this graph you can also choose to display either successful or failed executions.

Monitor errors on a per Process basis

In case you want to monitor specifically errors coming from Processes, the Errors widget will let you make a list of Processes with failed executions, sorted by latest failed execution timestamp. This is useful if you want to drill down further into where the errors in your Tenant are coming from.

While a single list of Processes and errors in them is efficient, usually it's the specific Environment that's the important part of the monitoring. Monitoring the Test Environment is not very useful, when the issues are happening in production. Widgets allow selecting the Environment they are pulling the data from, making sure that what you're monitoring is from where you expect it to come from, and not the whole Tenant with all of the development work on the way.

Focusing on specific Processes

In order to monitor only a subset of your Processes, Environment level separation probably is not enough. For this use case, tags can be used to specify which set of Processes to monitor in the chosen Environment.

In Dashboard context, tags provide a way to select a group of Processes to monitor within a widget, optionally with Environment selection as well. If your solution or target system specific Processes need to be monitored as a whole and separate from other systems' integrations, using tags is the way to go.

Adjusting the Dashboard view

Using the widgets allows you to specify accurately, what data is shown and in what format. While each widget can show only a specific piece of data, having multiple allows you to gather and combine monitoring data with different filters to get a complete overview to your Frends Tenant in one quick glance.

The Dashboard allows you to arrange the widgets however you see fit, by providing the option to drag and drop the widgets around to create different views to suit your style.

To remember which widget shows what data, renaming the chosen widgets is of course possible. Just click on the widget's title and you have entered the edit mode for the title.

In order to see what happened during integration flow execution, Frends has a view called Process Instance.

Step by Step Tutorial Available

If you prefer more visual or interactive guidance on how to view Process logs with Frends, you can find a step-by-step walkthrough from your own environment's home page, under Onboarding by selecting "Tutorial 2b, Step 2: Process Logs" tour.

Accessing process instances

The Process Instances are accessible through Process list by selecting Show Process instances. You can also access the Process Instance list by clicking on Last execution or Instance counts per day columns from the Process list.

Then selecting any of the Process Instances on the Process Instance list will take you to the chosen execution's Instance view.

Process Instance list filters

In the Process Instance list, you can filter the shown Instances using time period and the state of the Process Instance. The search also supports searching for results and values promoted from the Process execution using SQL wildcards.

The Instance list is automatically refreshed by default, to show the current state of the executions in almost real time. In case there are a lot of executions happening, setting the Auto refresh to Off might help in focusing on the earlier executions.

Process Instance view usage

From the Process Instance view it is possible to see what happened at each stage of the execution, shape by shape.

From the view, it's possible to click on the Process elements to see details of that part of the Process. Depending on logging settings in the Process as well as in the Agent Group, some details of the execution might not be always visible.

Functionality in the Process Instance view is similar to Process Editor view, but instead of allowing editing the Process and shape details, it shows what happened during the execution.

Common information shown for each shape are:

• Start time, when the execution of chosen shape was started

• Duration, how long the execution took for that shape

• Task or Expression, what was executed

• Result, showing what was the result of the execution

If extended logging is enabled for the Process or Agent Group (Log everything in Log settings), the input parameters are also logged and shown here. Because extended logging has some impact on performance, this level of logging is recommended to be used only temporarily. The Log settings provide an easy way to set Log everything for only a specified duration.

It's also possible that log settings were adjusted so that Only errors are logged, or Skip logging result and parameters is enabled for some elements in the Process. In these situations details for successful shape executions are not logged. This is useful for production use, when there can be many and more executions and as long as there are no errors, most details of the executions are not needed.

Process logs and Instances give a lot of detail about what is happening on the execution level, and most of the time, this is all it takes to figure out what is wrong. Sometimes the reason for issues in Processes is somewhere deeper, and the logs the Agents provide can shed some light on the root cause.

Step by Step Tutorial Available

If you prefer more visual or interactive guidance on how to view Agent logs in Frends, you can find a step-by-step walkthrough from your own environment's home page, under Onboarding by selecting "Tutorial 2b, Step 4: Agent Logs" tutorial.

Requirements

In order to access Agent logs, you will need to have at least Editor role in Frends. In case the roles and permissions have been changed, having at least Environments.View permission is required. Some actions are restricted to Environments.Admin level, but viewing the Agent logs is possible with only the View level.

Viewing the Agent logs

You can access the Agent logs by heading over to Administration menu and opening Environments.

Once in Environments, you will be presented the currently selected Agent Group and its features and settings. On the left, you have a list of Environments and Agent Groups within them, to change which Agents you are looking at.

You can learn more about the architecture Frends has for the execution environment at Hybrid Integration Architecture section.

For viewing the Agent logs, we want to click on the Agent(s) shown under Agent Groups.

By clicking on the Agent's name or the Agent card in general, you will directly access the Agent's logs, what is happening on the background. These logs will show, among others, errors coming from the Processes and Subprocesses, as well as resource usage and message queue warnings and errors.

By clicking on the error and warning messages, you can get more accurate message what happened at that point.

Below the Agent logs, you can also find Triggers that are deployed to the Agent. From these you can confirm which Processes and Triggers should be running on the Agent, as well as receive the whole URL for an API or HTTP endpoint, as long as the external URL is configured for your Agent.