Historical Data Playback REST API

Use the Historical Data Playback API to prime IBM® Business Automation Insights with historical process data from the IBM Business Automation Workflow Performance Data Warehouse, and to generate more meaningful dashboards.

The IBM Business Automation Workflow POST /std/bpm/historical_data_playback Operations REST API plays back data for completed processes that is stored in the Performance Data Warehouse. It then generates the corresponding events, and transfers them to Business Automation Insights for further processing. For more information about the REST API, see Operations REST APIs.

Prerequisites

To track and send data to the Performance Data Warehouse, BPMN processes in IBM Business Automation Workflow must have autotracking enabled. For more information, see Tracking IBM Business Automation Workflow performance data.

Generating events from historical data

If you call the API without parameters, process and activity events are generated from all the process-related data in Performance Data Warehouse. Depending on how much historical data you have, the playback might take a significant amount of time. You can reduce the number of generated events by including parameters with the API call.
Table 1. . Parameters for the Historical Data Playback REST API
Parameter Description
count_only Returns an estimate of the number of events that will be generated. Based on the returned value, you can call the API with the appropriate parameters.
containers Restricts the playback to instances that belong to the specified process application acronyms.
start_date Only events that occurred after this date are emitted.
end_date Only events that occurred before this date are emitted.
Tip: Because the API operates directly on Performance Data Warehouse, it is unaware of new events that were emitted by BPMN processes since the BPM emitter was enabled. To avoid duplicating runtime events that were pushed automatically from IBM Business Automation Workflow to IBM Business Automation Insights, set the value of this parameter to a date before the BPM emitter was enabled.
skip_duplicates_check To troubleshoot event playback, enable this parameter and tracing on the BPM emitter.

By default, events are generated and played back only once from Performance Data Warehouse; subsequent calls to the API will not send the same events again. However, you can replay these events without sending them to Business Automation Insights by setting this parameter to true.

For more information on enabling tracing, see Enabling tracing for BPM event emitter and Machine Learning Server.

Limitations

The main limitations are the following:
  • Only completed or terminated process instances are played back

  • Tracking groups defined on Intermediate Tracking Points and on activities are not played back

  • Autotracked data are only played back for the task activities. The tracking data for gateway, loop, start and end activities are not played back

  • Data concerning service flows are not played back

  • You cannot fully recreate the historical event structure. The main source for the historical data is Performance Data Warehouse. If historical process instance data is available in the IBM Business Automation Workflow Process database, this data is used to complement the Performance Data Warehouse data. 

  • You cannot use this REST API within a IBM Business Automation Workflow container deployment.

Troubleshooting

For more information, see Troubleshooting the BPM event emitter.