Process stuck in pending state

[karthik.pillai]

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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[SD]

Hi @RobertoMelendez
thank you for your update. I think there are different ways not only to reduce but also to avoid this issue meanwhile.
On the one hand there is a BP solution for it, which can detect and clear the pending sessions (How Start or Remove a Pending Process using Command Line | Blue Prism Product) . For this solution at least two BP Server are required. 

On the other side there is a workaround without an additional resource. Therefore you can use powershell and SQL scripts. These solution is described in this thread.

KR​

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S D
consultant
NoName
Europe/London
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[JerinJose]

Hi Karthik,

This issue was mostly reported in versions prior to 6.8. although the scheduling mechanism in BP is not changed there have been improvements in the liveliness checking of resource connectivity to application servers. I assume you are facing this issue when scheduling a process on multiple resources in same schedule. Blueprism session creation and triggering are two independent events which are followed one after other intermitted network glitches might wrongly report some of the resources as offline before the created sessions are fired. which will result in leaving the sessions in pending state. 

while Blueprism has a retry mechanism to ensure all resource in the scope of schedule is online before creating the session. unfortunately application wont check the resource status before firing the trigger.

there are two possible workarounds mentioned in this thread you can go ahead with any of them both worked for me in the past. after upgrading to 6.8 we are not facing this issue that often.

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Jerin Jose
RPA Product SME
EY
Asia/Kolkata
*"If you find this post helpful mark it as best answer, .*
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[NillWatson]

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.
____________________________
Hi-Lo Industrial Trucks Co.


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Nill Watson
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[炳杰谭]

Hi Peter

I used your solution, but I found that when I started the session, it was Terminated, whether it was manual or script. Have you ever encountered this problem?

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炳杰 谭
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[MDowney]

Hi, there! I see that this thread is a couple years old now, but I also see that people are coming back to it every now and then.

I was experiencing the same problem in that either the following task after logging in to the resource was forever pending, or wouldn't trigger at all. I rifled through the System tab to see if there was a better solution than having to rely on the login task's Post Completion Delay setting.

The solution that seems to work for me:
1. Go to System tab > System > Scheduler.
2. Resilience > If a resource is offline, retry after [30] seconds.
3. Resilience > Retry an offline resource a maximum of [15] times.

Experimenting with the Resilience values may be your solution, too. I am currently using v6.5.1.

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Max Downey
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[PetriKaukua]

Hi,

This issue is only happening for older versions of Blue Prism, if I remember its 6,7 or earlier. They way how processes are launched by the Scheduler have been changed and the change eliminated the pending process issue. If you are still running 6.5.1, I would recommend updating to 6.10.x

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Petri Kaukua
Certified Blue Prism Architect
Digital Workforce
Europe/Helsinki
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[JesperHededam1]

Hi.

We're on version 7.1.2 and for us we've just begun experiencing this pending issue where the scheduler fails to start a process in a schedule.

Our setup is such that we only login once during the morning and then we have the same windows user for all processes, so for us we can eliminate any login delay etc. for the cause of this. I can only assume it's a intermittent connectivity issue etc. within the scheduler so it fails to start the process it itself has just asked to start. It seems like it would be quite simple to fix within the Blue Prism application as it's basically just a column value in the DB table, so why it happens I don't know.

We didn't have this issue until we upgraded from 6.8 to 7.1.2 and we haven't had the problem in the past either on 6.7 and prior versions to my knowledge.

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Jesper Hededam
Developer
Codan
Europe/Copenhagen
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