Discover a new reality for those messy activity logs.
“This is your last chance. After this there is no turning back. You take the blue pill the story ends. You wake up at your desk and believe whatever you want to believe about the activity log.
You take the red pill you stay in wonderland and I show you how much better the activity log can be.”
We all know it. Our activity logs are a mess. We have tons of data to sift through whenever it’s time troubleshoot, and headaches to go along with it. Page after page of data changes, api write backs, list adds, webhooks and on and on. Whew.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s time to make your life just a little bit easier. Keep reading and I’ll show you a way to help break up the activity log and call out your processes. The only limits here are YOUR creativity when creating your call outs, and your judgement on how often to apply this (hint, be judicious).
First, take a few minutes to pick out some of your most complex processes and/or those that you routinely need to search for when troubleshooting or doing evaluations for your users.
Once you’ve identified these processes:
Take a few minutes to create companion string fields for each.
Add the new field to the beginning and end of your flows.
At the beginning of your process you can kick off with an easily-identifiable value in your helper field.
For example you can start a multi-leg consent process with something like <———Begin Consent Processing———>
HINT: The longer you make the data value here, meaning the higher the character count, the easier it will be for it to stand out in your activity log. I like to add extra “-“‘s so that it creates a nice clean line pushing out from the rest of the data.
At the end of your process close it out with a new value in your companion field.
For the consent processing example above you can end it with something like <——-End Consent Processing——->
Review how your new companion field appears in the activity log. Is it too close to the rest of your data? Add more characters to push it out into the open.
Boom! Now when you’re going through endless pages of logs you have a helper. The processes you troubleshoot the most will jump off the page and say “Hey, come solve me.” Well, they’re easier to find anyway. This saves you time and effort and helps to keep things at least somewhat orderly in a land of activity log chaos. Just remember folks, use this judiciously. You don’t want to clutter your logs (that defeats the purpose!) so you most likely want to limit this to 5 or so processes that you frequently have to track in your logs.
The story ends here for now, but stay tuned for another use case for these very same companion fields.
What, you thought we were only using these beauties for one thing? HA!
