Need some handholding on Zeebe Exporter API

I intend to build a Camunda Event Viewer of my own. I understand that I have to implement an exporter . I see tutorials showing me how to do that.

However, I would like to know more about the exporter APIs, the various types of Records and meta information that they carry, while I implement my own exporter and thereby, a visualizer. I believe this will help me to get a better understanding of the event stream that Zeebe generates.

Where should I begin? Could someone please handhold me?

Hi @nsengupta - unfortunately documentation around the records and events that are exported has not yet been written. A big reason for this is that there has been a lot of changes with the data, especially as we’ve worked to streamline the architecture of the C8 platform. It is on the roadmap, but is not yet available.

I would suggest starting with looking at existing exporters for Elasticsearch and OpenSearch, and seeing how they handle the data stream, what indices are created, and what is written to what index. These can be a bit abstract, so another good resource are the community-contributed Redis and Hazelcast exporters.

If you have any questions about specific records, I can try to hunt down information on them!

My experience of this has been a bit backwards, meaning you have to export and analyze the data externally before you can figure out which data you care about and which data you don’t.

From what I have seen of the raw records, they don’t really lend themselves to inspection and analysis while inside the exporter. There are a lot of potential different Record compositions and building logic to determine which one has arrived to the exporter gets ugly pretty fast, and possibly slow too, depending who you listen to about instanceof and type casting.

Solution: Serialize the record object to JSON with .toJson() and push it to your ancillary workload where you aggregate the data. Run some workloads and you will start to understand the data contained in the records and the stream. Then you can start figuring out what you care about and what you don’t.

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