Workload guidelines

To optimally use your work items and queues in Automation 360, review the guidelines.

Do's

  • Ensure that the queue has at least 2 owners so that there is no deadlock if an owner is deleted or disabled.
  • If work items are added frequently to a queue, set the reactivation threshold to 1 so that when a work item is added, the work item is added quickly.
  • Up to 10 work item columns can be displayed in the Control Room. Use this feature to get maximum visibility in to your work item data.
  • Optimally use work item values that can accept up to 1000 characters, especially for work item result values.
  • To prioritize certain work items, ensure that you sort the work item data when you create queues.
  • To insert work items in a loop, use the v3/wlm/workitems API because this API accepts a list of work items in JSON format.
  • Ensure that the time (clocks) in all the machines in a cluster are synchronized. This is important for the Apache Ignite cache server to function properly.
  • Persistent and continual database connectivity is critical for the functioning of workload automation. Therefore, ensure that you perform a periodic network scan or use tools that can detect or avoid network issues.
  • Apply the pagination filter to retrieve more than 200 work items when you retrieve them using the work item API.
    "page":
                    { 
                    "offset":0,
                    "length":1000
                    }

Don'ts

  • To ensure the system works efficiently, do not use the v3/WLM/workitems API in a loop to insert work items in bulk.
  • If the Bot Runner is part of a device pool, do not create local schedules on that Bot Runner so that the Bot Runner runs only the work items.
  • If a user has a queue in use, do not remove the Run bot permission from that user (role).
  • If a work item is in progress, do not shut down a Bot Runner.

    To take a Bot Runner offline for maintenance, ensure that you pause the queue and verify no work item is in progress on the Bot Runner.

  • If a work item queue is being processed, do not stop or restart the Automation Anywhere Control Room Service. Instead, pause the queue automation, and then restart the service.

Understanding automation priority

The priority decides the processing order of the automations. You can set the automation priorities at the various levels:
  • Bot: When you schedule a bot (High, Medium, or Low). For more information, see Set automation priority for your bots.
  • Queue (at device pool level): Define the order in which your automations run in the queues (Round robin or Priority as shown in table). For more information, see Order of the automation queue.
  • Work Item (at Queue level): Set the priority for Work Item column value. For example, First Name column ascending order and Email column descending order.

To understand how the automation priority works, let’s see the following scenario:

Consider you have Q1 with 1st priority at the device pool level and Q2 with 2nd priority. Q1 has work items such as InvoiceAmount and Total with the following work item level priority:
  • Q1 workitem level priority -> InvoiceAmount column ascending order
  • Q2 workitem level priority -> Total column ascending order
When you add multiple workitems to Q1 and Q2 at the same time, Q1 workitem which has the lowest InvoiceAmount will run first.

In such scenario, queue priority at device pool level has precedence over the work item priority.

Consider another scenario where you have a WLM setup as shown in the following table:
Bot and Queue name Device Pool Users
Process 1 1 1 Bot1
Process 2 Bot2
Process 3 Bot3
Process 4 Bot4
In the above WLM setup, if you have deployed all four automations parallelly, than it will first complete the workitems from the first deployed automation process. Then the one you have deployed second will start and the order continues. However, all the four automations will not run parallelly. Therefore, if you want to run multiple automations, create a setup as shown in the following table:
Bot and Queue name Device Device pool Users
Process 1 Device 1 Pool 1 Bot1
Bot2
Bot3
Bot4
Process 2 Device 2 Pool 2 Bot5
Bot6
Bot7
Bot8
Process 3 Device 3 Pool 3 Bot9
Bot10
Bot11
Bot12
Process 4 Device 4 Pool 4 Bot13
Bot14
Bot15
Bot16