Dashboard
The processes dashboard of Cockpit is the entry point for process monitoring. It comes with a pre-installed plugin, which lets you see deployed process definitions. Additional plugins can be added to the processes dashboard.
Deployed Processes
With this plugin you can easily observe the state of a process definition. Green and red dots signalize running and failed jobs. At this observing level a red dot signifies that there is at least one process instance or a sub process instance which has an unresolved incident. You can localize the problem by using the process definition view.
With the search component above the table, you can search for deployed processes by their name or key. To do so, click in the search box and select the property. Both of these search properties support the ’like’ operator, which allows searching for process definitions where the entered value is a substring of the property value.
Furthermore, you can copy a link to the current search query to your clipboard by clicking on the button and you can save search queries to your local browser storage by clicking on the button and inserting a name in the drop-down menu that appears. You can then retrieve the search query by clicking on the button and selecting the chosen name in the drop-down menu.
You can also switch to the preview tab which displays the rendered process model of each deployed process. Additionally, you get information about how many instances of the process are currently running and about the process state. Green and red dots signalize running and failed jobs. Click on the model to go to the process definition view.
CSV Export for Process Instances
Sometimes incidents make it necessary for the Operations Engineer to intervene manually. However, these incidents might not always be solvable from Cockpit if other services or systems are involved. For this case, Cockpit provides a feature to export affected process instances and their process variable values as CSV spreadsheets. The export feature helps to communicate efficiently with other system owners.
To trigger the CSV export, search for process instances and customize what properties you want to export by adding or removing columns. Suppose you are only interested in selecting specific process instances; you can checkmark the process instances of interest on the left side or select the whole page by checkmarking the box on the left side in the table header. You can select process instances across multiple pages. In the next step, you can choose a more coarse-grained process instance selection approach.
When you are satisfied with your configuration of columns, query criteria, and selection of process instances, click .
Clicking the button opens a modal dialog. You can define if you want to export your previous selection of process instances, the currently displayed page, or all pages.
Additionally, you can specify process variables by name to enrich the export result with the values of these variables.
Heads-up!
- Exporting all pages is more inefficient than exporting a selection or a single page of process instances and can cause extra load on the database and application server. Also, a more complex query that runs against an unbounded number of rows affects the execution time negatively.
- For security reasons, you can limit the maximum number of process instances that can be exported via the Query Maximum Results Limit.
When clicking Export CSV, the backend crunches the requested data and creates a CSV file. This could take a while, depending on the amounts of process instances you want to export.
As soon as the request succeeds, you should see a notification that the CSV creation was successful, and the button changes to Download as CSV. When you click the button, the download of the CSV file starts.
Export Result
The format of the export result is a file of Comma-separated values (CSV) (opens an external link to Wikipedia).
Structure of the Spreadsheet
- Each row in the spreadsheet represents a process instance, while each property has its dedicated column.
- The spreadsheet has a dedicated column for each variable property and displays its value in the respective row that matches with the process instance.
- The spreadsheet displays:
- A
null
value as<<NULL>>
- An unsupported variable value type as
<<UNSUPPORTED TYPE>>
- A non-existing variable as empty cell.
- A
Example
Limitations
- You can only export variables with the following value types:
boolean
string
date
double
,integer
,long
,short
(number types)
- You can only export the value property of a variable.
IN
operator
Cockpit provides IN
operator support when filtering for process instances for the following query criteria:
- Process instance ID
- Business key
- Process definition key
- Variable value
By default, the criteria defined in the search are linked together with a logical AND
(conjunctive normal form).
Occasionally, you may search for multiple query criterion values. The IN
operator allows searching for multiple values where any of the values match.
To use the IN
operator, select a query criterion that supports the IN
operator, and provide the values as a comma-separated list. To adjust the comma-separated list of values,
start editing by clicking on the value. You can expand the value in a modal dialog for easier editing by clicking on the button.