The Hiring sample: A custom BPMN dashboard

To create custom dashboards, you use Kibana. The custom dashboard for the Hiring sample shows an example of how to define widgets, such as pie chart, bar chart, and more, to visualize your business data.

Prerequisite

To display the data and graphics correctly, some visualizations rely on the taskRecord field that is emitted by IBM® Business Automation Workflow. However, this field is not emitted by default. Therefore, you must enable it manually.
  1. Enable the taskRecord field in the 100Custom.xml file of your IBM Business Automation Workflow configuration.
    <common>
     <monitor-event-emission>
       <task-record-enabled merge="replace">true</task-record-enabled>
     </monitor-event-emission>
    </common>
  2. Restart the deployment environment for the changes to take effect.

Index patterns

First, you design the index pattern. Index patterns indicate to Kibana which Elasticsearch indices you want to explore. An index pattern can match the name of a single index, or include a wildcard (*) to match multiple indices. For more information, see Predefined index patterns and searches.

The Hiring sample dashboard uses three index patterns, which all search data from completed and active process summaries.
  • The process-summaries-* pattern filters data on the startTime field. Therefore, the data displayed in the dashboard corresponds to the processes and tasks that were started in the time window specified from the Kibana time picker " ".
  • The process-summaries* pattern filters data on the completedTime field.
  • The *summaries* pattern does not use any time filter.

Saved searches

Based on the index patterns, saved searches are created.
  • The Processes and Tasks searches are based on the process-summaries-* index pattern.
  • The Completed Processes and Completed Tasks searches are based on the process-summaries* index pattern.

Widgets

The searches are used to create visualizations, also called widgets, which show your business data in the way you want. To be able to create a widget, you must first decide which type of data you want to visualize and in what form. To check the results, you click Play. For any widget, you can also click Advanced and use the Exclude and Include fields to select the data that you want to show or hide.

The Hiring dashboard displays various widgets. A few interesting ones are presented here.
Pie chart
  • To see the percentage of the different hiring managers in the global hiring process, the pie chart is the best choice. From the Processes search, the aggregation by Terms is chosen, on the values of the HiringManager.string.keyword field. It is also possible to limit the size or change the sort order.
  • The pie chart is also a good choice to represent the average duration of completed tasks in completed hiring processes. The widget is based on the Completed Tasks search. The Y-axis represents the aggregation by Average on the duration field value. The X-axis represents the aggregation by Terms, on the values of the name.keyword field.
Bar chart
The bar chart is used to show the distribution of the departments that hold hiring positions. From the Processes search, the aggregation by Terms is chosen, on the values of the location.string.keyword field. It is also possible to limit the size or change the sort order.
Heat map
The heat map is used to show where the positions are available and related location details. From the Processes search, the aggregation by Terms is chosen, on the values of the location.string.keyword field. It is also possible to limit the size or change the sort order.
Gauge chart
The gauge chart can be used to display what proportion of an objective has been fulfilled. For example, if a user must complete five hiring processes per week and actually completes more than five hiring processes in the latest 7 days, the chart is green. If the user completes fewer than five processes , the chart is red to indicate that the results are below expectations in the latest 7 days.

This chart is based on the *summaries* index pattern, to which a filter is added to filter the completed processes from the Hiring sample. To display the processes that were completed in the latest 7 days, the completed time is set to now-1w to now. Two ranges are defined: 0-5, associated with red, and 5-50, associated with green. The Auto Extend Range option is selected.