Review the Top Traces section of a View to quickly find the most common paths and the total number of paths in a process.

A trace is a sequence of activities for a particular Case. You can think of a trace as the path that a Case took from the start to its final destination, whether that destination was Success, Rejected, Cancelled, or another activity.

Pega Process Mining uses the Activity name along with the Timestamp in an event log to reflect the trace for each Case ID. In the following figure, Case data extracted from an event log shows that Case 13477 has a trace of Accepted > Assigned > Dispatched, based on the Timestamps:
The Activity column from an event log shows that Case ID 13477 went from Accepted to Assigned to Dispatched based on the Timestamps.
Event log data reveals a trace

Reviewing Top Traces

During process discovery, you can view the most common path that people used to complete a process. To find this information, in the right pane of a View, look at the Top Traces section. Top Traces initially sorts traces in descending order so that you see the most common trace at the top of the list. You can hover over any of the traces to display a tooltip that shows the full name for each activity in the trace, as shown in the following figure:


Hovering over a trace in the list shows a tooltip that has each activity name listed in order and spelled out fully.

Hovering over a trace in Top Traces

Use case: Analyzing a process using Top Traces

The number to the right of each trace indicates the number of times the trace occurs during the date interval that you selected at the top of the page. As you go down the list, use these numbers in combination with the trace tooltips to guide your analysis.

For example, in the following figure, the most common trace occurs over 11,000 times, and follows a standard path of Assigned > Dispatched > Received > Accepted > On the Way > In Progress > Success. The next most common trace occurs nearly 2,000 times. When you hover over the next trace, you see that a path that required rework occurred 830 times. This trace is Assigned > Dispatched > Received > Rejected > Open > Assigned > Dispatched > Received > Accepted > On the Way > In Progress > Success.

The number to the right of each trace indicates how many times the trace occurred. A tooltip shows the trace path that occurred 830 times.

Reviewing trace occurrences

The metric at the bottom of the Top Traces section tells you the total number of traces. You can compare this number against the number of Cases in Fast Metrics to start analyzing variation. In the following figure, the total number of traces is 922, which means that out of the 20,000 Cases included in the Process Map, the work was completed close to 1,000 different ways. This finding indicates a potential opportunity to reduce variation. In addition, a large number of traces often indicates process loops.


Fast Metrics provides metrics for Cases, Events, Average Duration, and Total Duration.

Process discovery using Fast Metrics and Top Traces together

Filtering Top Traces

To focus on specific traces and perform deeper analysis, you can include or exclude traces by applying a filter. The filter that you apply updates the Process Map and the Fast Metrics and also applies the filter to other main areas of the View, such the Dashboards.

To begin, in the Top Traces section, click to select each trace in the list that you want to either include or exclude in a filter.
NOTE: To cancel a selection, click the trace again.
Click the Filter icon to display a list of filter options, as shown in the following figure:

Selected traces are highlighted in gray. Clicking the Filter icon lists filter options.

Filter icon displays filter options
To show only the selected traces, click Filter selected traces. To show all traces except for the selected traces, click Filter all except selected traces.
NOTE: The Look for probable causes option provides a way to begin root cause analysis to understand why selected traces occur.

Filtering Top Traces demo

The following demo shows how to filter using Top Traces. In this demo, notice that the filter changes the Process Map and the Fast Metrics. In addition, the header of the application displays this filter so that you can easily remove or inverse the filter.


An animation shows how to filter the View to focus on specific traces.

Filtering Top Traces demo