Workload Management guidelines

To make optimal use of the Control Room Workload module, you can choose to follow guidelines provided by Automation Anywhere.

Do

  1. Ensure that the queue has at least 2 owners so that there is no dead-lock if an owner is deleted or disabled.
  2. If Work Item are added frequently to a queue, set the reactivation threshold to 1 so that as soon as a Work Item is added, the same will be picked up.
  3. There could be upto 10 Work Item columns displayed in Control Room. Make generous use of that so that you have maximum visibility of your Work Item data.
  4. You can also make generous use of the Work Item values which can accept upto 1000 characters, especially for Work Item result value.
  5. To prioritize certain Work Items, ensure that you sort the Work Item data when you create queues.
  6. For adding work items to queue, use CSV as XLS format is not currently fully supported - for example the date-time format.
  7. To insert Work Items in a loop, use the v2/wlm/workitems API as this API accepts list of work items in JSON format
  8. Ensure that the time/clocks of all the machines in a Cluster are synchronized. This is important for proper functioning of the Apache Ignite cache server.
  9. Persistent and continual database connectivity is critical to the functioning of Workload Management. Hence ensure that you have a periodic network scan or use tools that can detect/avoid network blips.
  10. Apply the pagination filter to retrieve more than 200 Work Items when you retrieve it using the Work Item API.
    "page":
    { 
    "offset":0,
    "length":1000
    }

Do not

  1. To ensure the system does not clog, do not use the v2/WLM/Work Item API in a loop to insert Work Items in bulk.
  2. 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 workload management Work Items.
  3. If a user has a queue in use, then do not remove the the Run bot permission from that user (role).
  4. If a Work Item is in progress, do not shut down a Bot Runner. To take a Bot Runner down for maintenance, ensure that you pause the queue and no Work Item is in progress on the Bot Runner.
  5. If a Work Item queue is being processed, do not Stop or Restart the Automation Anywhere Control Room Services. Instead, Pause the queue automation, and then Restart the services.