Understand how to set and manage automation priorities in workload management systems, detailing the hierarchy of priorities at automation, queue, and work item levels. It illustrates scenarios where queue priority at the device pool level takes precedence over work item priority and provides guidance on deploying multiple automations effectively.

The priority decides the processing order of the Workload Management (WLM) automations. You can set the automation priorities at various levels:
  • Automation: When you schedule an automation (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 work item level priority -> InvoiceAmount column ascending order
  • Q2 work item level priority -> Total column ascending order
When you add multiple work items to Q1 and Q2 at the same time, the Q1 work item which has the lowest InvoiceAmount will run first.

In such a scenario, queue priority at the 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 in parallel, then it will first complete the work items from the first deployed automation process. Then the one you have deployed second will start, and the order continues. However, all four automations will not run in parallel. Therefore, if you want to run multiple automations, create a setup as shown in the following table.:
Automation 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

For more details, see 3 Priorities associated with a WLM Queue (A-People login required).