'Execute missed schedules' not working

[ChristianJuhl]

Hi guys, We only have two licenses in our organization, and we have quite a few processes running. Therefore, we have many missed schedules due to the license limitation. To avoid having to run the missed schedules manually, it would be nice to have this done automatically, but the 'execute missed schedules ' feature is not working. We are running BP 6.4.1, and it did not work when we were running 6.2 either. I have been in contact with customer support, and they told me that upgrading to 6.4.1 should fix the problem, but it didn't. Have you guys had success using the 'execute missed schedules' feature? Am I missing something here? Is there somewhere apart from the 'execute missed schedules from the past x minutes' setting where you can enable the feature?

[Steve__Blake]

We too aren't able to utilize the missed schedules feature.  We've been told that a server reboot might sort the issue but for us, it hasn't.  Would be good to have as we are running 30 licences and we still have failed schedules that we then have to manually kick off. One thing you could try is to vary the start times of your schedules.  We found we were starting our schedules on the hour or on the half hour and so we did have some success scheduling in 5 minute intervals. Obviously varying workloads might still cause failed schedules but it does help.   Cheers 

[ChristianJuhl]

Thanks for your reply Steve. Have you tried to resolve the issue on top of rebooting? Varying the start times of our schedules wouldn't solve our problem as our workloads vary a lot. Can we find someone out there that has the feature working?

[david.l.morris]

Hi Christian, I know this isn't what you're going to want to hear/see. But the 'execute missed schedules' feature only runs when Scheduler first starts up, which I imagine is only when the Blue Prism Server service is starting up. So, even though the way you're wanting it to work is intuitive, it's specifically for schedules that were missed while the server was not running. Here's an excerpt from the System Manager documentation in Blue Prism: When the scheduler initialises, it can check back for recent schedules which should have executed while the scheduler was not running. To configure how far back the scheduler should check, the number of minutes to look back can be entered in the 'Execute missed schedules from the past n minutes' text box. To set the scheduler to not look back at all, a value of 0 (zero) should be entered. Note that if a schedule is discovered which should have executed multiple times in the configured period, it will only be executed once. Equally, schedules which have successfully run will not be executed again. Also note that this setting is only effective when the scheduler is starting up, so it will have no effect on a running scheduler. To accomplish what you're looking for, you could consider Dynamic Scheduling. In your case though, with only 2 licenses, you would almost certainly want to set up a script that runs outside of Blue Prism (not consuming a license) that would start up Blue Prism process sessions by CLI commands. I've seen a few people on this forum who have done this in production. I've only done this for testing and funsies, but I've never had a requirement for it in prod. Maybe amibarret will respond with his solution. He's described it before on other posts, but I don't have the link that post right now. Dave Respectfully, Dave

[ChristianJuhl]

@david Thanks. So I was missing something. Now it makes sense. I will try to set up some sort of dynamic scheduling. However, I've tried searching the forum, but I'm not able to find anything on this issue directly. @amibarret If you're reading this, could you please respond with your solution to this issue? Thanks in advance!

[AndreyKudinov]

@christianjuhl If schedule is missed due to other process running late, you could just schedule them one after another on one huge scheduler job. Possibly adding sleeping processes in between them with parameters to make sure next one doesn't get to run earlier than expected. It is a mess to deal with if you suddenly need to stop whole thing in the middle for some reason and restart at some other point, but it would do the trick if your processes are stable enough to not need any manual intervention most of the time. Whole schedule system (and active queues, which are not very 'active') is a big disappointment, but I guess Blueprism is not very interested in improving this, because you are technically forced to buy more licenses this way. I read somewhere some client just create their own scheduler to solve this.

[ChristianJuhl]

@aikudino Thanks for your reply. It's a fine idea, and I have contemplated this, but it seems a bit suboptimal. I prefer having one process per schedule. I see your point. Execution of missed schedules (while the scheduler was running) would probably be an easy feature to add, but I guess it would in less license revenue. I will look into to third-party scheduling.