Logs - ElasticSearch

Help Insights
,
2

Hi @Felipe_Kotinda,

Very good question.

Background:
UiPath uses NLog for all its log generation and NLog is extremely customization. Read more here: (Robot Logs)
In the Orchestrator web.config file you can include not only the default key values but also many other log parameter. Read more here: (Logging and Log Levels)

Once you have the NLog config choosen, you can choose to save the log in a custom file which will be consumed by your dashboard software.

Why not to use UiPath Orchestrator Dashboards?
Although a good feature, I do not recommend standard Orchestrator dashboard for anything more than just a quick analysis.

Advantages of custom dashboards:

  1. You do not want to limit yourself to Orchestrator dashboard which is only lasts for the previous 30 days.

  2. You can make dashboards both for management (monthly reports of robot utilization) and surveillance (production errors)

  3. With a custom dashboard solution you can pinpoint any failure event and the log message obtained during the execution. This has saved us a lot of hassel finding the reason for a failure.

  4. You make create not only charts buy also use the dashboard as a tool for developers to identify failures under production.

  5. Sending exceptions cases / reports directly to manual case handlers.

Disadvantages:

  1. You will need some development time to setup project dashboards as per your design and stakeholders need to be involved in its design.
  2. Data forwarder issues in any of the visualization tool will also need some focus such that if robot / orchestrator has a down-time the data forwarder can restart as well.

Alternatives:
Other than UiPath Orchestrator and Kibana, you can use

Grafana,
PowerBi,
Tableau,
Splunk,
UiPath Insights
and many others

All these tools do two operations; a) parse the log files from robot execution, b) prepare the required data for charting or reporting.

Our experience:
In our organization we choose to go with Splunk as it was already available in-house and all we needed is a dedicated index for RPA CoE. Splunk has a data forwarder on the robot/ orchestrator machine. All logs are reported to the defined index.

From the index we generate process execution reports (one dashboard per delivered project) and monthly execution reports ( total robot transactions, total robot runtime in hours, manual process time without a robot, production date). The manual runtime is estimated time given by process owners during the initial process evaluation.

Our management appreciates that the RPA CoE not only automates mundane work but also reports exactly what the savings are. Monthly reports show how the robots are performing on the different processes.

So, you are on the right track. It is very important that all stakeholders involved have an overview of robot processes and as developers we are aided by troubleshooting tool, and that is the main reason to use custom dashboards.

Hope this helps! Good luck to you.

2 Likes