Tracking variables: the one design decision

A business identifier attached to every instance, chosen at DESIGN TIME and unchangeable afterwards. Without it you cannot answer "what happened to invoice 4471" without reading payloads one by one. This is the single highest-value decision in operating an integration, and it costs one field at design time. Without a tracking variable, the console shows a list of instances identified by timestamp and status. Somebody asks what happened to invoice 4471. You have no way to find its instance except by opening runs one at a time and reading their payloads, and there may be four thousand of them from that day. In practice the answer becomes "I cannot tell you", which is how an integration acquires a reputation for being a black box. WITH ONE, YOU SEARCH FOR 4471 AND GET THE INSTANCE. Its status, its activity stream, its failed step. The question takes ten seconds, and the same…

In this module: Module 13 · Monitoring, tracking and alerting

1. 1The monitoring console
2. 2Tracking variables: the one design decisionFree preview
3. 3Reading a failed instance
4. 4Payload retention, and its limits
5. 5Errors versus rejections in the console
6. 6Alerting: who, when, how loud
7. 7The silent failure: nothing ran
8. 8Reporting to the business
9. 9What breaks: the integration nobody knew had stopped
10. 10Lab briefing · Make a failure visible in five minutes