Set recording levels

This page explains how the information about your Bonita processes can be recorded, and how to configure what is recorded.

Foreword

There are three ways to record the information of a process:

  • Archive: used by a business analyst or process administrator using Bonita Runtime, during the production phase, to trace the running of the process instances in their life cycle. Records who did what and when.

  • Technical log: used by an application developer for troubleshooting, debugging and process tuning.

  • Queriable log: used by a database administrator extracting information related to business actions that is stored in the internal database to be retrieved by a database request.

You can configure the information that is recorded in the archive and the logs.

Archive

In the Bonita Applications, after a process is executed, it can be viewed using the "Archived" filter. There you can find the information on the process instances (the cases). This information is also available using the Web REST API. By default, all the information is archived but in some editions this is configurable.

Recommended configuration (Access, Enterprise and Performance only):

  • To keep all the user activity, set all the flowNode types to true.

  • To maximize the overall performance of the system and reduce the disk space used by the database, set all the values to false. Completed tasks will not be visible.

Between these two extreme cases, you can customize archiving to your exact need.

Technical log

Bonita Engine uses SLF4J to log and Log4j2 as loggers implementation in the Tomcat bundle.

You can configure the log level. The log level can be set on several categories in the file log4j2-loggers.xml. Some loggers are very specific to a particular issue. For example:

  • If you have an issue related to the database access, it might be interesting to change the level of the logger org.hibernate from the default, WARNING, to DEBUG.

  • When debugging cache issues, change the level of the logger net.sf.ehcache.

  • For the process execution, the relevant properties are org.bonitasoft and (for Subscription editions) com.bonitasoft.

Queriable log

You can use the queriable logger service to log in a database the creation, deletion or update of bonita objects that are not related to a process (for instance users, groups, roles, profiles). Items that can be archived cannot be included in the queriable log.

To configure what information you want to record in the quieriable log, modify the bonita-tenant-sp-custom.properties. This file contains a map of available events. By default all are logged (the value is set to true). If you do want to log a particular event, set the value to false and restart the Bonita Engine.