Event log
An event log is the chronological record of activities executed in a process, structured so each row represents one event (case ID, activity name, timestamp, optional resource). Process mining algorithms consume event logs to discover the actual flow, conformance with the intended flow, and bottlenecks.
Event logs are the raw material of process mining. The minimum schema is case ID + activity + timestamp; richer logs add resource (who performed it), cost, duration, and arbitrary case attributes. The bottleneck for process-mining adoption is rarely tooling — it's getting clean event logs out of the source systems. Most enterprise applications either don't emit events or emit them inconsistently. The pragmatic approach: pick one process, instrument the few systems involved, and prove value before expanding. The XES (eXtensible Event Stream) XML format and CSV are the dominant log formats.
Discussed in our use-cases
ICP-targeted pages where event log is part of the framing.
Related terms
- BPMN
Business Process Model and Notation is the ISO 19510 standard for graphically representing business processes as flowcharts.
- Process discovery
Process discovery is the process-mining technique of constructing a process model (typically BPMN or a Petri net) from an event log without prior knowledge of the intended process.
- Conformance checking
Conformance checking is the formal process-mining technique of comparing an event log to a reference process model and producing fitness, precision, generalisation, and simplicity scores.