Resource Pool

[harathi_salla]

Hi, i need a clarification regarding Resource Pools. i created a POOL with 4 bots. But when assign a process to a Pool, only once of the resource start working on the process. I thought all 4 resources will start working on it. So, what should I do to assign a single process to a pool and all the resources should work on it ? Suppose if there are 50 bots in a pool, how can assign a process to all resources in that Pool. If only one resource works, then what is the use of creating pools ? Thanks in advance.

[NandakumarJadav]

The advantage of creating an pool, is to get the flexibility of sharing a group robots between multiple processes. It is not to assign the one task to multiple robots!! You could create an scheduler where you create this mapping 50 times. So whenever you run the scheduler all the 50 robots will start of simultaneously.

[harathi_salla]

HI Jsnkrao... Thanks for the reply. If we create scheduler for each tasks and totally 50 schedules.. then what is need to create pools ? in what kind of scenarios we will create pools.

[TetsujiJunicho]

Pools are for backup. If a pool is consisted of two runtime resources and one is down, the other backups and runs.

[SteveBoomer]

Hi, But you wouldn't need 50 schedules for what you want to do, one Schedule is enough. When selecting the process and resources, expand the pool so you can see resources, then highlight all the resources in the pool and drag them onto the process (rather than the pool). It will run the process on all the resources selected, rather than choosing one from the pool itself. The Pools offer flexibility by maximising availability. Hope this help. Regards, Steve

[MantasPadimansk]

But as far as I understand it's manual work. Someone must select those resources and drag drop them on specific process, with scheduler you omit person from the equation. Processes are started by blue prism itself. My question is how to use resource pools without human dropping stuff on processes?

[Anonymous]

Multibot Architecture. You have to use multibot architecture to run a single process on multiple bots

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Sanghamitra Konduri
Technical Service Engineer
Personal
Asia/Kolkata
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[DaveMorris]

Initially it is manual work in Blue Prism to set up a schedule for however many resources a process needs to run on. If you need 10 sessions of a process to run at the same time from a schedule, then you need to drag and drop the process 10 times. Then, each time the schedule starts, it'll spin up 10 sessions, assuming runtime resources and license availability.

As far as Pools, when you create the schedule, you can do the same thing but you drag and drop the process 10 times onto the resource pool instead of on a specific resource. When the schedule triggers, it will spin up session after session available resources in the pool until it hits 10 sessions, runs into a license limitation, or runs out of available resources.

There is one issue I've seen others encounter and I have as well, but it's hard to reproduce. What will happen is that if the first resource that a session is started on is the primary resource in the pool (the one with a star next to it) and that session is in exclusive mode, then all other sessions will fail to start because Blue Prism will think the entire pool is busy because the primary resource on it is. Has anyone else encountered this? I just had it happen on 6.5 and I'm thinking I might submit an enhancement request.

Edit: FYI, when I say that it's required to drag and drop the process 10 times, I am saying this is true if you only use in-built functionality in Blue Prism such as Scheduler in Control Room. It's pretty easy to spin up as many a session as you want by using CLI commands from an outside application or script. I've been using PowerShell to do this and it works reliably.
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Dave Morris
3Ci @ Southern Company
Atlanta, GA
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[AmiBarrett]

We did an initial evaluation on the built-in pool functionality and wound up writing our own controller to handle custom pooling instead.

To your point with CLI commands, we have it check which queues need work priority based on workload and the queue priority setting made within the control room. It can dynamically spin up as many or as few bots with the process as-needed once there is data to work (no additional trigger required). It can also spin down some instances after an item is worked to make way for another process.

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Ami Barrett
Lead RPA Software Developer
Solai & Cameron
America/Chicago
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