Process stuck in pending state

[KarthikPillai]

HI, 

I have a process scheduled to run every 5 mins, however, every once in a while it gets stuck in the pending state and we have to go in and manually restart it to get it to work again. 

How can we keep a tab on the process so that it doesn't get stuck in the pending state ? Is it possible to trigger an alert if it's stuck in the pending state for more than a certain duration ?


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Karthik Pillai
FourNxt
Asia/Dubai
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[DaveMorris]

There's no native way to trigger an alert if a process gets stuck in a pending state. You may want to look into why that is happening because it should not occur. How often are you saying this happens?

I hate to make a suggestion like this, but if scheduler is not performing correctly for you, have you considered changing the process so that it runs constantly all day long and it has logic built in to only do its job every 5 minutes? The way it sounds to me with it running every 5 minutes, you're already essentially eating up a full license all the time anyway.

I think most people accomplish this kind of monitoring through external tools that query the BP database. (I have seen suggestions to always mirror the production DB and query the mirror. I haven't seen any real reason to do this but I figured I'd point it out)

As for troubleshooting why the session gets stuck as pending... Have you looked around at various logs such as event logs and what not? I think it'd be useful to determine what situation causes the session to get stuck that way. It's also possible that you could solve the issue by upgrading Blue Prism since there were several versions with known scheduler issues. We encountered issues with 6.2, 6.3 and versions around there. However, we've been using 6.4.1 for a little while and have encountered no scheduler issues. And so far I haven't seen anyone report issues about 6.5 scheduler.

Just some things to consider. I feel your pain. Scheduler and alerting features need to be improved.

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Dave Morris
3Ci @ Southern Company
Atlanta, GA
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[Walter.Koller]

We were having the same issue with a job scheduled each hour. It ran fine for more than one day but then the job stayed in pending state.
We could not figure out the reasons as we would expect the scheduler to at least start the job or receive an error when trying to send the job to the robot.
So assigning the job to a robot works but it was never started.

We dont use resource pools and have Blue Prism 6.4.0.

We noticed, this only happened when there is basically only this job scheduled and there is not much other activity on this resource. (There was one other job running only once per day).
We now changed the utilization of our resources and two jobs running every 20 minutes and two other jobs once per day. Since then we didnt experience any pending job issues anymore.

​

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Walter Koller
Solution Manager
Erste Group IT International GmbH
Europe/Vienna
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[PeterLacken]

Hi,  It is best to have such a trigger independent of Blue Prism.  Use an monitoring tool that can query to the Blue Prism database and query the following SQL examples on a schedule.  They will look for pending sessions that have been pending for 10 minutes or more (indicating they are stuck).  

--per process
select convert(varchar(255), s.sessionnumber) as sessionnumber,
 s.startdatetime as startdatetime,
 convert(varchar(255), s.statusid) as statusid
from BPASession s, BPAProcess p
where s.processid = p.processid
and p.name = '<PROCESS NAME>'
and s.statusid = 0 --pending
and s.startdatetime < dateadd(minute, -10, getdate())

--all processes
select convert(varchar(255), s.sessionnumber) as sessionnumber,
 s.startdatetime as startdatetime,
 convert(varchar(255), s.statusid) as statusid
from BPASession s
where s.statusid = 0 --pending
and s.startdatetime < dateadd(minute, -10, getdate())

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PeterLacken
Webstep AS
Peter.Lacken@rria.no
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[PetriKaukua]

So far we have seen this issue happen with all versions of Blue Prism from 5.x to 6.7.2. We are not running 6.8 in the production yet so I can't say anything from that version.
Most annoying thing with this issue is that there are nothing in the event logs on the application servers or on the robots so you can't even start to try to guess what might be the issue. Scheduler just seem to plain randomly leave scheduled processes to be stuck in pending state with no apparent reason. We  have seen this happen with single processes in a new environment and with multiple processes stuck in pending after another in an older and larger environment.
For example this morning, suddenly 13 processes that were supposed to start on 13 different robots between 8am and 8:30am, all were stuck in pending state. When start was issued manually, all processes started as expected. These processes have been running without issues for the past week. Nothing in the event logs on the robots or on the application servers so it is very frustrating to have to build external monitoring that alerts people to do manual work considering how simple part of the software is not working reliably.

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Petri Kaukua
Certified Blue Prism Architect
Digital Workforce
Europe/Helsinki
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[PeterLacken]

Hi,

Totally agree it is less than ideal to have this type of external monitoring.

I have now a Powershell script that runs on a Windows Task Manager that checks for Pending sessions and then restarts them. It will also notify to a Teams Chanel the status of the restart.

i Can tell you it is no better in v6,8.

Use of RPA Supervisor instead of the Scheduler helps too but has additional cost.

I would be happy to help install our solution on your application server on a hourly rate. It should not take more than half a day if you have resources available with the correct admin permissions.

Regards,
Peter

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PeterLacken
Ren Røros Intelligent Automation
Peter.Lacken@rria.no
http://www.rria.no
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[NicholasZejdlik]

This seems to be a bug in Blue Prism server, as far as I can tell. We used to have this problem intermittently; it was quite annoying to log in on Monday morning to find none of our processes ran over the weekend. We switched to an external scheduler (and turned off BP server altogether), using the Blue Prism command line to launch processes at the appropriate time. Two years and 455,000 process launches later, we've not had a single one get stuck in pending.

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Nicholas Zejdlik
RPA Developer
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[JanSkarbek]

Look at this thread: Scheduler Pending Session Starter VBO | Digital Exchange (blueprism.com).
The process attached there solved this issue in my case (on BP 6.4, I don't know how it works on older/newer versions).

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Jan Skarbek
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[Prashant]

Hi Jan Skarbek,

I get a message - "You are not eligible to view this message" when i click on the link you posted. What kind of access do i need to see it?

Regards
Prashant 

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Prashant
Software Engineer
IMF
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[JanSkarbek]

Hi @Prashant​,

Now I see the same, I don't have access to this page anymore.

Check this thread, there is sth attached there : How Start or Remove a Pending Process using Command Line | Blue Prism Product

Cheers

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Jan Skarbek
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