Activity Log overview

Activity Logs help you to understand what your message flows are doing by providing a high-level overview of how IBM® Integration Bus 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. Patterns of behavior and changes to such patterns are easier to identify than in more extensive product trace. The qualitative data about resources provided in Activity Logs complements the quantitative resource data provided by resource statistics.

Activity Logs can be written to a circular file system. Use the ActivityLog configurable service to set up file logging if you want continuous logging of activities over a long period.

The configurable service 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.

Activity Logs can be retrieved programmatically by using the IBM Integration API.

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.