Activity Log overview

Activity Logs help you to understand what your message flows are doing by providing a high-level overview of how IBM® App Connect Enterprise interacts with external resources. They do not require detailed product knowledge, and can be used to enhance understanding of the overall system.

Activity Log messages are concise and avoid technical complexity, although more information is provided in the message detail. Because the log entries are short, uncomplicated, and focused on single activities, they can be quickly scanned and understood. Identifying patterns of behavior and changes in behavior can be done more easily with Activity Log messages than if you use more extensive product trace. The qualitative data about resources that are provided in Activity Logs complements the quantitative resource data that is provided by resource statistics. Because Activity Logs are enabled by default, they can be useful for troubleshooting. For example, if the Activity Log for a message flow shows a prolonged period of inactivity, review the Activity Logs for associated resource types. You might discover that a problem with an external resource is the reason why messages are no longer being processed by your message flow.

Activity Logs can be written to a circular file system. Use the Activity Log policy to set up file logging if you want continuous logging of activities over a long period. The policy has extensive filtering capabilities, based on tags. You can use tags to search or filter on various attributes, such as resource types or message flow names. All Activity Log messages have several tags, which are displayed in the log entries and can be used as search and filter keys. Individual resource types also have resource-specific tags that you can use to retrieve the data that you are interested in. For more information, see Activity Log policy (ActivityLog), and Writing Activity Logs to files.

Activity Logs can also be viewed in the web user interface. For more information, see Viewing Activity Logs for message flows in the web user interface.

For more information about the types Activity Logs that are available in IBM App Connect Enterprise, see Activity Logs structure and types.