Task Usage and Task Logs

When making use of the babelforce Task engine, it is essential to have visibility if and when a task was executed, to debug errors, or simply find a specific task. For both requirements the manager offers tools you can use.

The Task usage overview

In the menu item Monitoring,  you find the section Task usage. If you have active tasks running, the image below gives you an idea of what you might see:

The Task usage overview, by default, presents all tasks that were executed in the last hour and aggregates tasks by minute. When selecting a longer time range, the aggregation will be adjusted accordingly. If they are colored red, it indicates that some tasks were completed with an error.

The keys in the header always show ALL_TASKS cumulated. They then split by task type. In other words, if you only have 1 task type, they will be equal to ALL_TASKS.

By clicking on the key, you can hide them from the view. This could look like this:

To view a specific day or week, use the date and time picker.

To summarize: This view gives you insights into whether and when a task of a specific type was executed. You can also get an overview of how many tasks were executed within a specific time frame.

Task Logs

Go to Reporting > Task Logs to find this section.

By default, this section will be empty. 

You can request them by clicking on the loop, however, ideally restrict the search criteria. You can:

• search for a specific task id
• restrict the created at date
• select the task type
• only search for errors
• or restrict the number of results you are getting

To view the logs, always click on the loop. Below, you see an example of what might be presented.

In the example above, you see only successful tasks. They all completed without an error.

Task with an error

Below, we will look at an example in more details. However, be aware, this will get a bit technical at times as the responses are sent and received in JSON. If you are usure how to read these logs, find help with a person familiar with tasks or get in touch with the Success team. If you understand the data that is exchanged between babelforce and the other system you should be able to read the logs.

Open the task. You will see different stages, "Scheduled", "Processing", or "Completed". It indicates at which point the actions were executed. In our example, we only had 2 actions on Scheduled. The action sends data to a geckoboard.

Open the second action, http:

You are now presented with three more tabs. They represent

• what was sent in (input)
• what was received from the other system (output)
• and give, if available, the context of the task from previous scripts (available data at this point in the execution)

In the example below, babelforce sends three values to Geckoboard:

• Value: 20
• Min Value: 0
• Item: 0

The example below presents a possible output. In this case, the system simply replied with "Success", indicating, that the values were successfully received and processed.

Our example has no context.