Set Up Process Insights for Appian on Kubernetes

This page describes how system administrators can set up and manage the process insights capability of Process HQ in an Appian on Kubernetes environment.

What is process insights?

Process insights lets business users explore how processes actually run in your organization. Users can track performance with key performance indicators (KPIs), investigate specific cases, and generate shareable insights—all within Process HQ.

Process insights does not require Appian AI. A small number of Process HQ features are enhanced by Appian AI if you choose to configure it separately.

Set up process insights

To set up process insights in a new self-managed environment:

1. Add the following custom property to your Appian CR configuration file:

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   spec:
     customProperties:
       conf.iam.pm.unifiedMiningPmRedirectUri: "http://appian-process-insights-janus.<namespace>.svc.cluster.local"
   

2. Restart the Application Server.

Validate process insights setup

To validate that process insights is working correctly:

1. In Appian, assign yourself as a data steward for the record types that store process data.
2. Open the navigation menu, and select Process HQ. By default, the Home page appears.
3. In the left navigation menu, click Process Insights. The Process Insights page appears.

4. Add a process using data from those record types.

   Note:  Adding a process initiates the analysis of your process data. It may take a few minutes to complete this initial analysis.

5. Once the process status reads Update successful, verify that the process data appears:
   • Check that the Total Cases column and Average Duration values for the process are populated in the process list.
   • Click the name of the process in the process list, and confirm that process data is present in the header and analysis panes.

Upgrade an existing environment

If you are upgrading from an existing environment running an Appian version where the standalone infrastructure was required to support process insights, perform the following steps:

1. Upgrade your self-managed environment to Appian 26.9 or later. Your existing processes in Process HQ update to the new architecture automatically. No manual action is required to migrate process data.

2. Validate the process insights setup.

3. (Optional) If you encounter any problems with process insights after upgrade, temporarily revert to the standalone architecture:
   1. Set the appian.feature.ae.process-mining.pm-query-lib custom property to false in the Appian CR configuration file.
   2. Restart the Application Server.

   Note:  This custom property has temporary effectiveness; it will be removed in a future Appian release.

4. Decommission the previous infrastructure.

Decommission previous infrastructure

You should only decommission the process insights infrastructure after upgrading your self-managed environment to Appian 26.9 or later.

No process data is lost during decommissioning. Process configuration, views, key performance indicators (KPIs), and insights are stored in Appian.

Step 1: Update the Appian CR configuration file

1. Keep conf.iam.pm.unifiedMiningPmRedirectUri configured as-is in your Appian CR configuration file.

2. Remove the following from your Appian CR configuration file:

   Property	Location
   PROCESS_MINING_HMAC_JWT_SECRET environment variable	spec.webapp.env
   conf.iam.pm.unifiedMiningPmAudience custom property	spec.customProperties

3. Restart the Application Server.

Step 2: Uninstall the Helm chart

Run the following command:

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helm uninstall appian-process-insights -n <NAMESPACE>

where <NAMESPACE> is the Appian platform namespace.

This command removes the Janus and Thor deployments, their service accounts, and the process insights network policies.

Step 3: Delete the secrets and revoke credentials

Delete the Kubernetes secrets:

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kubectl delete secret process-insights-database-credentials \
   process-insights-objectstore-credentials \
   process-insights-auth-lcp-janus \
   process-insights-auth-janus-thor \
   -n <NAMESPACE>

Then revoke the credentials:

• Drop the PostgreSQL user you created for process insights.
• Delete the object storage access key or IAM role used by process insights.

Step 4: Remove the data stores

If you provisioned the PostgreSQL database and object storage bucket solely for process insights, delete the main schema and the object storage bucket.

Step 5 (Optional): Clean up supporting configuration

If you configured firewall rules, egress rules, or mirrored container images only for process insights, remove those configurations.

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