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Storing Process Instance and Activity Statistics

The View Service Instance Dialog displays cumulative statistics for process engines. You can also store statistics for each executed process instance and each executed activity. Statistics are stored in a comma-separated value (CSV) format that can be imported into most analytical tools, such as Microsoft Excel.

Enabling/Disabling Statistic Collection

Statistic collection is controlled differently for process engine statistics and activity statistics. Statistic collection for process instances is controlled by a custom engine property. Statistic collection for activities is controlled dynamically while the process engine is running.

Collecting statistics on a per process instance or activity basis affects the performance of the process engine. Extra processing and I/O is required for gathering and writing the statistics to a file. Collecting statistics on an activity basis is especially resource intensive. It is recommended that you collect activity statistics for brief periods of time while determining the performance requirements of a system or while tuning an application. It is not recommended that you continuously run activity statistic collection on a production system.

Process Instance Statistic Collection

Process instance statistic collection is controlled by the custom engine property bw.engine.jobstats.enable. The default value of this property is false indicating that statistics for each process instance should not be stored. Setting this property to true enables the gathering of statistics for each process instance.

See Chapter 8, Custom Engine Properties for more information about custom engine properties.

Activity Statistic Collection

You can enable or disable activity statistic collection using either TIBCO Administrator or TIBCO Hawk commands. This section describes the TIBCO Administrator approach. See Chapter 9, Performance Tuning for more information about TIBCO Hawk commands.

To control activity statistic collection, perform the following procedure:

1.	Under Application Management, select All Service Instances or go directly to a specific application and select All Service Instances.

2.	Click a process engine name.

3.	Click the Engine Control tab.

4.

In the Statistics Collection pane, click the Start button to begin statistics gathering for activities or click the Stop button to halt statistics gathering. The current status of statistic gathering is detailed in the Status field. If statistics gathering is disabled, the Status is Off. If statistics gathering is enabled, the Status field details the location of the file containing activity statistics.

You can enable or disable statistic collection for the activity elapsed time in the Output schema of JDBC activities by setting the property java.property.bw.activity.output.stats.elapsedTime.activty_name in designer.tra for design-time and bwengine.tra for runtime. Setting this property causes a performance overhead and hence it is recommended that you use this property in a non-production environment as a diagnostic tool. You can turn off the property and not calculate the elapsed time at run-time by setting the property java.property.bw.activity.output.stats.elapsedTime.turnoff in the bwengine.tra file. See TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks Palette Reference for details.

Managing Statistics Files

Separate files are kept for process instance statistics and for activity statistics. The name of the activity statistics file(s) are in the format stats-<timestamp>-<filenumber>.csv. The name of the process instance statistics file(s) are in the format jobStats-<timestamp>-<filenumber>.csv. These files are stored in a location determined by the bw.engine.stats.dir custom engine property. The default location of this property is <engineWorkingDir>/stats.

For activity statistics, a new file is created each time statistics collection is enabled. For process instance statistics, a new file is created each time the process engine is started or when the statistics file reaches the specified size. You specify the maximum size for job statistics files with the custom engine properly bw.engine.jobstats.rollover. The property specifies the maximum size in megabytes

See Chapter 8, Custom Engine Properties for more information about custom engine properties.

Process Instance Statistics

One record per process instance is created and stored in the process instance statistics file. Table 3 describes the statistics stored for each process instance.

Table 3 Stored process instance statistics

Statistic	Description
jobId	ID of the process instance.
processName	Name of the process definition the process instance is executing.
startTime	Time stamp at process instance start.
endTime	Time stamp at process instance completion.
elapsedTime	The endTime minus the startTime. The total clock time that has elapsed during the execution of the process instance.
evalTime	The sum of the evaluation times for each executed activity in the process instance. Evaluation time is the time between the beginning and end of the evaluation period. This should be close to but is not exactly equivalent to CPU time, due to the limitations of statistic computation.
status	Status of the process instance at completion. This can be either succuess or error.

Activity Statistics

One record per completed activity execution is created and stored in the activity statistics file. Table 4 describes the statistics stored for each activity.

Table 4 Stored activity statistics

Statistic	Description
startTime	Offset (in milliseconds) from the start of statistic gathering to the time the activity was invoked.
elapsedTime	The time when the activity ended minus the time the activity started. The total clock time that has elapsed during the execution of the activity.
evalTime	The time between the beginning and end of the evaluation period for the activity. If the activity completes in one step, the evalTime and elapsedTime would be the same. However, some activities, such as Request/Reply or Wait for... activities typically do not complete in one step.
jobId	ID of the process instance in which this activity executed.
processName	Name of the process definition the process instance in which this activity is located.
callStack	When the activity is executed as part of a called process, this column contains the call stack from the original process to the called process.
paged	Specifies whether the process instance was paged out to disk when the activity was invoked.

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