I would like to implement some custom monitoring logic that captures certain information from the provenance repository. It would be similar in some ways to the existing SiteToSiteProvenanceReporting task, but it will not be sending information to another NiFi node but instead sending things to an in-house tracking service that we use.
There is a little information about writing custom reporting tasks in the NiFi developer documentation, but it’s pretty limited in what it covers. I want to make sure I capture all the events that come in, and I want to be resilient to situations when the NiFi node is rebooted, or certain components are stopped temporarily, etc. To get an idea of how to best accomplish this I’ve been looking at the source code for SiteToSiteProvenanceReportingTask on GitHub. It appears to push a delegate a lot of the details of event capturing to the org.apache.nifi.reporting.util.provenance.ProvenanceEventConsumer class. I’ve poked around that class to see what it does, and I think I could use it In my own custom reporting class to make things easier. However, that class doesn’t seem to be documented publicly anywhere, and isn’t mentioned in the developer guide. I am concerned that it might be necessary to treat this as a private class that may change from release to release. How would you recommend that I proceed to create my own provenance event reporting task? Should I mimic SiteToSiteProvenanceReportingTask and built it on top of the ProvenanceEventConsumer class? Should I instead pull out the parts of ProvenanceEventConsumer that I need and create my own version of that class that I can control? Any other approaches I should consider instead of the path I’m heading down now?
