Logging, Reporting, Explainability

OpenRules supports logging, traceability, reporting, and explainability of the produced decision for auditing decision flows.

Logging. By default, OpenRules relies on the commonly used Java logging framework SLF4J that provides an easy way to write logging information and serves as a simple facade for various logging frameworks (e.g. LOG4J) allowing the end user to plug in the desired logging framework at deployment time. During the decision model execution, OpenRules produces an executing trace that shows all executed rules and the values of the related decision variables. Here is a trace sample:

A user may use the property “trace=off” in the file “project.properties” to shut down this tracing.

Reporting. By default, during the executing of the decision model OpenRules produces the execution reports in the HTML format placed in the folder “target/reports”. Here is a report example:

This reports shows only decision tables and rules inside them that were actually executed along with decision variables and their values highlighting the changes. By clicking to links in the first column a user will be taken to the proper Excel file and cell in which the executed rule is specified.

A user may use the property “report=off” in the file “project.properties” to shut down this reporting.

Explainability. Both HTML reports and audit traces can be useful to explain which certain rules were executed or skipped and why OpenRules engine did it. However, for large decision model it can be difficult to analyze large generated reports/traces. In such cases. OpenRules customers may use OpenRules Graphical Debugger that allows business users to execute all rules on by one or table by table and analyze the current content of all involved decision variables.  Here are typical views of the OpenRules Debugger that visually explains what is being currently executed and why:

Custom Logging and Auditing. Some customers want to create their own model specific logging and auding mechanism. OpenRules provide a special Java API to satisfy such custom requirements.