Managing Schedules outside of the GUI (AutomateC.exe ?)

[JesseJenken]

We have regularly scheduled maintenance windows which often result in team members having to log on after hours to manually set schedules to Maintenance mode.  They then have to log on following the outage and re-enable schedules (disabling maintenance mode), manually starting ones that should have started prior to the end of the maintenance window to ensure they're running.


I've been tasked with finding a way to automatically turn schedules off for these maintenance windows, and it's been suggested to modify the database values to initiate a maintenance mode event.  
I would much rather use the tools provided to achieve this task, however it doesn't appear as though AutomateC.exe provides the necessary functionality to do so.

I see the following cli switches (running BP 6.9):

/startschedule
/deleteschedule
/viewschtimetable
/viewschedreport


Has anyone tackled a similar requirement, stopping and starting Blue Prism schedules automatically with either AutomateC, or by creating the DB relationships to link a BP Schedule to a Maintenance calendar?


Thanks in advance, for any guidance anyone can provide!

[TusharVarshney]

Hi Jesse,

I have had come across such requirement once where we used Blue prism BP to extract Schedule reports and reason. We have no write access to PROD db hence we have not done this however we have had a successful PoC if that can be achieved. if you need if could share the SQL query to find out the schedule reports.

[JēkabsRutkis]

This is a problem I have not encountered as all the maintenance windows for projects I have worked on have been night and weekends, when we could schedule around these times and not worry about them in the long run.
From what I see there are several options that you can try with AutomateC.exe, however I wouldn't recommend any of them. 

• /removelicense before maintenance and /license after the maintenance - no schedules can execute if the license is missing. However I don't think that it would stop already running processes.
• /unpublish and /publish - Process can not run from scheduler if it is not published. However I don't know the implications with this, might break the existing schedules. 
• /poolremove and /pooladd - this would require for all schedules to use pools and for you to know all the resource names to manage this. Schedule can not run if there are no machines available for it. 

Maybe the solution can be to shut down the BP Applications servers for the maintenance period. I imagine that would be the easiest thing to automate.

Or you can try to bring the resources down before maintenance and then back up without worrying about BP schedules. When the resources would come back on the BP schedule would run the processes itself, provided that the settings configuration can be correctly adjusted.

[Prashant]

Hi Jesse,

Can't say I understood the problem correctly, but wouldn't setting up the day as holiday in calendar disable all the schedules.. Of course all the schedules are expected to use a calendar. If some schedule does not use any calendar then it will continue to trigger during a holiday as well.

In my case most of the maintainenance happens on weekends and only one calendar has weekends as working day - so I just need to setup an holiday in that calendar. However when there is a maintenance on working weeks, i have to setup holiday on all the calendars. One inconvenience with this approach is that if you want to disable the schedule for only few hours - you cannot do it in advance as it sets the "entire day" as holiday. So you need to set up the holiday before you start maintenance; wait for any already triggered schedules to complete; perform maintenance and then remove the holiday so that the schedules can resume.

It should be quite easy to add holidays to system calendars directly in the database too instead of through the interface, although i can appreciate your reluctance to do it this way.

Hope this helps.