Unlock Observability: Your Guide to Getting Started with UAC

Knowing your automation ran is not the same as knowing it ran well. Observability closes that gap — giving you real-time visibility into task health, SLA performance, system metrics, and the external applications your workflows touch.

In this webinar, Nils Buer, VP of Solution Management, and Len-Maurice Seemann, Product Management Coordinator, walk through how to enable and use observability in Stonebranch Universal Automation Center, with live Grafana demos throughout.

Nils covers the architecture first: UAC's Universal Controller, agents, and extensions all emit metrics, traces, and log data via OpenTelemetry. Grafana Alloy, installed on the controller server, acts as the OpenTelemetry Collector, forwarding metrics to Prometheus, traces to Grafana Tempo, and logs to Grafana Loki. Len then walks through account setup on Grafana Cloud — including how to configure data sources, verify connections, and import pre-built UAC dashboards from a downloadable JSON file. The full Grafana Cloud free tier is sufficient to get started at no cost.

The dashboard demos cover task execution history, success and failure rates, per-task duration variation (with ML-powered forecasting that flags when jobs run longer than usual), real-time controller log streaming via Loki, and end-to-end trace views in Tempo. A cloud data transfer deep-dive shows how UAC extensions emit user-defined metrics — including transfer speed, source distribution, and success rates — that render directly in Grafana panels.

The most technically detailed demo shows bidirectional Grafana-to-UAC integration: when a Grafana alert fires because task instance usage crosses 75% of the monthly license limit, it sends a webhook event to the UAC webhook receiver, which automatically disables a time trigger to reduce job volume. When usage drops back below the threshold, Grafana sends a second resolved event and UAC re-enables the trigger — all without manual intervention. The same pattern applies to any alert condition: SAP system overload, Azure pipeline failures, or any metric that crosses a defined threshold.

Key Highlights

• Step-by-step setup: configuring UAC agent, OMS, and controller config files for OpenTelemetry export
• Grafana Alloy as OpenTelemetry Collector: forwarding metrics to Prometheus, traces to Tempo, logs to Loki
• Pre-built dashboard import from JSON — no dashboard-building from scratch required
• ML-based task duration forecasting using Grafana's machine learning metrics module
• SQL data quality checks: monitoring row counts and revenue values from UAC task outputs directly in Grafana
• Azure Synapse pipeline monitoring with drill-through links to Azure from Grafana panels
• Automated webhook alerting: Grafana fires → UAC disables trigger → Grafana resolves → UAC re-enables trigger
• No Stonebranch licensing cost to enable observability; Grafana free tier sufficient for initial setup
• Available from UAC version 7.5 and later

About the Presenters

Nils Buer Director of Product Strategy (EMEA), Stonebranch
Nils Buer brings more than 20 years of enterprise IT experience to his work at Stonebranch, with deep expertise in IT automation and orchestration across SAP, cloud platforms, and hybrid IT environments. Before joining Stonebranch, he held senior leadership roles at Ericsson, SAP, BMC, and Capgemini.

Len-Maurice Seemann Product Management Coordinator, Stonebranch
Len-Maurice Seemann specializes in observability at Stonebranch, focusing on Grafana dashboard design and OpenTelemetry data pipelines for metric, trace, and log collection across UAC environments. He is also pursuing a B.Sc. in Physics at Heidelberg University.