Enabling and Validating Business Automation Workflow Business Data in Business Automation Insights Dashboards on Cloud Pak for Business Automation

Steps

1). Enabling Tracking in BAW to Emit Business Data to BAI

BAW(CP4BA) emits business data to BAI only when tracking is enabled in the process application. Tracking ensures that key process variables are included in the applicationData section of BPMN events, allowing BAI to display them in dashboards. BAW offers two mechanisms to track data in a process, you can use autotracking, tracking groups, or both.

Autotracking automatically captures values of selected process variables at entry/exit of BPMN elements.

1. Open the process in BAStudio.
2. Select the Tracking tab.
3. Enable Autotracking.
4. Choose variables to be tracked.
5. Assign a meaningful Short Name (alias) for each variable.
6. Save and create a new snapshot, then deploy it.

Autotracking is the fastest method for enabling BAI visibility in demo or simple applications (e.g., Hiring Sample).

Tracking groups provide more control over tracked data. For example, use tracking groups track a selected group of process variables across multiple processes or process applications and to store tracking points for a timing interval. To enable tracking groups, make sure that Enable Tracking is selected under the Overview tab of the process. (By default, the checkbox is selected.) Your system administrator can change this default. Note that the Enable Tracking setting does not apply to services with tracking points. Tracking data is always enabled when services contain tracking points.

1. In BAStudio, create a new Tracking Group.
2. Add Tracked Fields to the group and assign types and IDs.
3. In the BPMN diagram, select an activity/task.
4. Under Tracking → Pre & Post, select the tracking group.
5. Map process variables to tracked fields.
6. Save, create a new snapshot, and deploy.

This method allows teams to track specific KPIs across multiple processes.

2). Sample BPMN Events Emitted After Tracking is Enabled

Once tracking is enabled and the application is deployed, executing a new instance generates BPMN events such as:

• bpmnx:PROCESS_STARTED
• bpmnx:ACTIVITY_READY
• bpmnx:ACTIVITY_ACTIVE
• bpmnx:ACTIVITY_COMPLETED

Tracked business data appears in the applicationData section of these events. These events flow through BAW → Kafka → Flink → OpenSearch → BPC. This confirms tracking is working end-to-end.

3). Steps to enable tracking for Hiring sample application from BAStudio and create new instances from Process Portal. (Get the BAStudio URL from access ConfigMap icp4adeploy-cp4ba-access-info).

1. Open Hiring Sample in BAStudio.
2. Go to Tracking and enable autotracking.
3. Mark variables (e.g., city, department, position type) as tracked.
4. Deploy a new snapshot.

BAW emits tracked data only for new instances created after tracking is enabled. To generate new events:

1. Log in to Process Portal. (Get the URL from Access ConfigMap)
2. Launch the Hiring Sample process (e.g., Standard HR Open New Position).
3. Fill out the task form (Position Request, Department, Location, etc.).

The entered data becomes tracked business data.

4). BAI Dashboard view for newly created instances from Hiring sample.

1. Open Business Performance Center (BPC).(Get the URL from Access ConfigMap)
2. Navigate to Workflow – Processes dashboard to view overall process counts.
3. Select Workflow – Hiring Sample to view detailed charts.

Screenshots show BAI successfully displaying:

• Position Location
• Employment Type
• Department
• Approval statistics
• Task wait/processing durations

These confirm the complete integration path is working.

Important notes: 

1) New instances are required: Tracked business data appears only for process instances that are started after tracking and event emitter configuration changes are applied. Existing or already running instances do not retroactively generate tracked events.

2) Historical instances do not appear: Past instances cannot emit tracked data because the BAW event emitter works strictly in real time. Historical executions do not replay or regenerate events for BAI. However, if required, you can migrate old instances to a new snapshot and then continue processing them. Once migrated, only the new execution path from that point forward will produce tracked events that BAI can ingest.

3) Snapshot deployment is mandatory: Tracking changes including autotracking, tracking groups, and tracking points take effect only after a new snapshot is created and deployed. BAI starts receiving tracked data only from instances launched using the updated snapshot.

4) Historical data “PlayBack” option exists (when you need dashboards populated with past data): If you already has historical workflow execution data stored in Performance Data Warehouse (PDW), BAW provides a Historical Data Playback mechanism to generate BPMN events from historical PDW data and send them to BAI for processing and dashboarding. This is done using the Operations REST API endpoint.

POST /std/bpm/historical_data_playback.

Key limitations are described here: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cloud-paks/cp-biz-automation/25.0.1?topic=events-historical-data-playback-rest-api