Dashboard & Monitoring

Frends Platform contains multiple levels of analytics and monitoring, from top-level performance and resource usage logs to integration execution logging to monitoring services and error handling that alert you if something happens. All of it presented in user friendly manner that is both easy to understand and flexible to adjust.

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.

Dashboard widgets

At the core of Dashboard are the customizable widgets that allow you to organise and filter the view as needed.

At the simplest level, counters for successful and failed Process executions are provided, which you can filter according to Environment and tags added to Processes. These are useful for showing the current count from the chosen time period, and how it has changed from the earlier time.

To give more tracking on the trend of execution counts, Process execution graph can be used to visualize the trend of Process execution counts over a period of time. It can used for both longer time periods, spanning multiple days, as well down to one day, showing the changes in execution counts within the day by the hour.

Common need and use case for monitoring is for errors. The errors widget provides you with a simple list of Processes that have had errors in the executions lately. It too can be filtered by Environment and Process tags, allowing you to focus on the specific set of Processes that make up your solution.

How to access Dashboard

You can find the Dashboard from Frends Control Panel, from the menu under your profile name.

To learn more about Dashboard, you can check out our guide at How to use Dashboard.

Integration execution logs

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.

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 erroneus executions, to save bandwidth, storage and performance for the actual execution.

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 clear view to less technical personnel on what happened during each Process execution.

Promoted values & Skip logging

Sometimes it's also useful to get more details about an execution into the Process Instance list directly. 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 by that value.

A side effect of the promotion is that the value will always be logged in the Process Instance, regardless of the set log level, including input parameters. Promoted values can thus also be used as a debugging method even when the Environment as a whole would otherwise have reduced logging set.

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 in many ways. Under default log level settings, the maximum data size logged is limited to 100 array entries or 8192 characters of textual data.

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.

Error handling & Monitoring

Frends implements multiple ways to handle errors from Processes. While the best option is to have no errors, working with multiple external systems means not everything is controlled by Frends.

Process error handling

Each Process in Frends can implement their own error handling procedure. At its simplest, a Catch shape can be used to handle any errors within the Process, without disrupting the Process execution more than necessary. This can be useful, if execution should continue for the remainder of data being handled, or if the error is small and can be fixed during the execution.

Another option for error handling is using a common Subprocess to handle any errors that occurred during Process execution. This way if there are errors within Process that were not handled, a Subprocess will be called and it will execute its logic to handle the error. Common scheme to handle errors is to send an alert by email, optionally having a treshold value before or after sending an email.

Because the error handling is implemented as a Subprocess in Frends, the logic for it is just as flexible and easy to create as the integrations themselves. It should be noted however, that the Process execution will have stopped by the time the error handling Subprocess is executed, so it is only usable for alerting and possibly for cleanup of the Process.

Monitoring Rules

In case even more complex monitoring and email alerts are required, Frends includes Monitoring Rules. These rules can be set to trigger a Process or send email alert if the conditions are fulfilled in the environment.

Common use cases for Monitoring Rules are to see if errors occur multiple times over a time period, or if integrations are not executed at all within a specified time, or less times than what is expected. They can also be used to monitor if something takes longer than expected. While these would be difficult to check and monitor within Process Instances, at Environment level it becomes easier and more intuitive to set up rules to monitor your integrations.

At the basis of Monitoring Rules are the promoted values from Processes. Monitoring Rules specifically target and monitor the promoted values from all Processes in the Environment, so it's possible to target either one or more Processes, or only specific errors from multiple different Processes.

And when the Monitoring Rule does notice that an alert should be made, it can be set to be either a simple email alert to specified recipients, or more advanced set of alerting and error handling tasks by triggering a Process to run, when the rules are fulfilled.

System logs

Frends platform provides logs to monitor the systems that are running your Frends Tenant.

Agent logs

Agent event logs, accessible under Administration and Environments, show system and Frends Agent events, showing what is happening in the background. Any unhandled errors from integrations, system errors and possible causes of more widespread issues are shown here for each Agent in your Tenant.

API Monitoring

In order to monitor what is happening with your Frends APIs, the API monitoring page shows you all the connections made into your tenant, and what happened with them.

You can easily filter the log by API operation, status code of the response, and what method was used, to figure out what is happening. The logs include events for all requests made against your tenant, and not only the specified API endpoints, so you can also see all the unsolicited attempts made against your environment.