We’re excited to announce the release of Camunda Optimize 3.7.0-alpha2.
Camunda Optimize provides business activity monitoring for workflows, supporting continuous process improvement by providing transparency into your automated workflows and decisions. Business-friendly reports, dashboards, and alerts make it possible to identify process bottlenecks, improve end-to-end processes, and evaluate the success of your process automation initiative.
To get started with Optimize 3.7.0-alpha2 right away, you can download the release here with your Camunda Enterprise Platform customer credentials.
And if you’re not a Camunda customer yet, you can sign up here for a free 30-day trial of the Camunda Enterprise Platform, which includes Camunda Optimize, or sign-up for a 30-day Camunda Cloud trial.
What’s New?
Optimize 3.7.0-alpha2 contains new features to help monitor and analyze the performance of multiple processes, in addition to continuing to close the feature gap between on-premise Camunda Platform and Camunda Cloud. Here’s a quick rundown.
- Multi-Process Templates allow you to quickly create a dashboard or report that summarizes the performance of up to 10 processes.
- Log Scale visualizations allow you to see how diverse processes perform in a single report.
- Incidents are now available in Camunda Cloud to track when a process instance stops due to an error.
- Object Variable Import lets you enrich your process data with business context without additional setup.
- Variable Filter OR Logic allows you to use these new variables to define powerful reports that trigger new insights.
- If you can’t solve your problem in Optimize, our data export improvements make it easier to analyze process data in a different tool
Here’s an example of how it should all fit together:
Pam owns a portfolio of 10 processes. Using the Portfolio Performance Template introduced in Optimize 3.6, she quickly creates a multi-process dashboard summarizing their performance. When she looked at a line chart showing how often each process ran over the last month, she noticed that some processes logged thousands of instances, and others had a few dozen. She adds a log scale to track changes over time in these processes. Overall, Pam noticed that a few processes ran particularly slowly and a few others had incidents, so she shares the dashboard with Barry the business analyst to figure out what’s going on.
Barry reviews the dashboard and identifies the slow-running processes. In addition to quickly creating a few analysis dashboards from the existing templates, he uses the outlier analysis feature to identify if the outliers have anything in common. He notices that two thirds of the outliers were custom orders, represented by the variable order.type = “custom”, and that half of the outliers had an order length of six items. He combines data from these object variables into a single filter using OR logic. This gives the right picture to identify the root cause. On another process, he wants to plot two variables against each other. Since this isn’t supported yet by Optimize, he uses the data export API to send the data to another analytics tool.
Barry shares his findings with Pam, who then asks her development team to revise the process. A few weeks of development later, these changes are in production and Pam immediately sees the processes become faster and more reliable through her dashboard.
Here’s a deep-dive into each of the new features.
Multi-Process Templates
Creating an overview of several processes has just become 50x faster. Now, you can quickly create a collection with the processes you care about, select up to 10 processes for your new dashboard, and Optimize does the rest.
In addition, Optimize automatically filters down the templates based on the number of processes you’ve selected.
Log Scale
Reports comparing multiple processes have just become much easier to read. Select the logarithmic scale if you want to make it easy to detect changes in diverse processes.
Incidents for Camunda Cloud
Camunda Cloud users have the ability to holistically analyze operational performance through incident reports. You can show reports that display incident-prone steps of your process, improvements in incident rate, and faster incident handling over time.
Object Variable Import
Object variables store valuable data that can be used to enrich your data available for analysis, and now Optimize automatically imports and flattens them into multiple primitive variables. For example, the person object has two attributes: age and name. Optimize converts these into variables that you can use for analysis just like any other variable.
Person:
{age: 50,
name: kermit}
Variable Filter OR Logic
More expressive variable filters take advantage of the additional data you have available for analysis. Now that you have more variables, you may need to combine them in different ways. Optimize now supports variable filters being combined with OR logic, enabling greater usage of the business data you’ve entered.
Data Export Improvements
Camunda Optimize is your data source for process data, no matter where you perform the analysis.
Optimize already supports the ability to download 1,000 rows of a raw data report, but sometimes that isn’t enough. We’ve made two changes:
First, if you are trying to download a CSV with more than 1,000 rows, we give you a warning that not all the data will be included.
Second, you can use a new API endpoint to extract all your data in JSON format, which is easier to process if you want to feed your Optimize data into another analytics tool or a data repository.
To get started, you need to know the report ID and have an access token. Here’s an example:
- Report ID: e6c5abb1-6a18-44e7-8480-d562d511ba62
- Access Token: mySecret
- Maximum Records per Page: 2
- Pagination Timeout: 60s
Initial API call
GET api/public/export/report/e6c5aaa1-6a18-44e7-8480-d562d511ba62/result/json? paginationTimeout=60&access_token=mySecret&limit=2
Response content:
{
"searchRequestId": "FGluY2x1ZGVfY29udGV4dF91dWlkDXF1ZXJ",
"numberOfRecordsInResponse": 2,
"totalNumberOfRecords": 11,
"data": [
{
"processDefinitionKey": "aProcess",
"processDefinitionId": "aProcess:1:1801",
"processInstanceId": "1809",
"businessKey": "aBusinessKey",
"startDate": "2021-12-02T17:21:49.330+0200",
"endDate": "2021-12-02T17:21:49.330+0200",
"duration": 0,
"engineName": "camunda-bpm",
"tenantId": null,
"variables": {}
},
{
"processDefinitionKey": "aProcess",
"processDefinitionId": "aProcess:1:1801",
"processInstanceId": "1804",
"businessKey": "aBusinessKey",
"startDate": "2021-12-02T17:21:49.297+0200",
"endDate": "2021-12-02T17:21:49.298+0200",
"duration": 1,
"engineName": "camunda-bpm",
"tenantId": null,
"variables": {}
}
]
}Response
Status 200.
Subsequent API calls
Please note here the use of the query parameter searchRequestId to retrieve further pages from the initial search.
GET api/public/export/report/e6c5aaa1-6a18-44e7-8480-d562d511ba62/result/json? paginationTimeout=60&access_token=mySecret&searchRequestId =FGluY2x1ZGVfY29udGV4dF91dWlkDXF1ZXJ&limit=2
If sent within the pagination timeout duration, then Optimize will return the next page of process instances.
What’s Next?
We’ll release the full version of Camunda Optimize 3.7.0 in January 2021. Stay tuned!
Expect to experience a smooth update from Camunda Optimize 3.6 to Optimize 3.7. Along with the minor release, we will publish a dedicated update guide.
How to Get It
If you want to give Camunda Optimize a try, you can download the release here with your Enterprise customer credentials. Please sign up for a free 30-day Camunda Platform trial or sign-up for a 30-day Camunda Cloud trial.
If you’re new to Optimize, we recommend that you watch the Getting Started with Optimize in less than 5 Minutes video.
