When Audit Events are Generated

You can define which process activities will generate auditing events.

You set whether an activity generates events in design time, and you can set this for each activity, for activity groups, or for the whole process. You can also set whether the process engine generates events or not at run time.

Design Time

Design time event generation options are set in Studio. At design time, the following options are available for each activity:

Setting	Description
Default (default setting)	Indicates that the activity will record events according to the group or process default, as described below.
Generate Events	The activity will generate events, regardless of the group or process default.
Do not Generate Events	The activity will not generate events, regardless of the process default.

Also at design time, the following options are available for each group:

Setting	Description
Default (default setting)	Indicates that the group's activities will record events according to the process setting, as described below.
Generate Events	The default for the group's activities will be to generate events, regardless of the process default.
Do not Generate Events	The default for the group's activities will be not to generate events, regardless of the process default.

The following options are available for each process. These settings will be used by activities or groups set to Default. If a group or activity is not set to Default, it will ignore the process setting.

Setting	Description
Generate Events for Interactive Activities (default setting)	Each activity set to the Default option will generate events if it is interactive, and will not generate events if it is automatic.
Generate Events for all Activities	Each activity or group set to Default will generate events.
Do not Generate Events	Each activity or group set to Default will not generate events.

Run Time

You set run time event generation in Process Administrator, for each process engine. You can set each process engine to one of the following event recording modes:

Setting	Description
Depends on Process (default setting)	Indicates that the process engine will follow the settings of each process. That is, it will follow the design time settings as described in the section above.
Never	No events are recorded, except instance begin and end activities. Design time settings are ignored.
Always	All activities generate events, regardless of process, group, or activity settings. Design time settings are ignored.

Remarks

If all settings are left at their defaults, a process will generate events for interactive activities and not for automatic activities. Begin and End activities are always generated.

This is a reasonable default because activities that require human interaction have the most variable execution times. However, you may want to measure some automatic activities, for example those that invoke external systems that for whatever reason have variable execution times.

Each event generated has a slight performance cost. This cost is not important for interactive activities since these activities spend most of their time waiting for participants to execute them. However, it may have significant impact on automatic activities that are performed frequently.