missing vs offline status in BP Control

[Walter.Koller]

Hi,

Until now we didn't pay much attention to if Runtime Resources are shown as 'missing' or 'offline' in Control since we know why those RR are not online. So it is not the question of 'why the RR is not online' but 'why is it missing and not offline'. 

We were approached if we can avoid showing RR as 'Missing' since the red color automatically make people think there is a critical issues, while we just moved a VDI temporarily to another environment. 

We are not aware of any differences in handling RR that are missing to the ones that are showed offline. Quick search here gave me no answer to why this exactly happens. (and questions by other customers haven't been answered).

We don't force kill Windows processes or cut network cables that might prevent Blue Prism from properly closing itself and unregistering from the server. The only scenario I can think of is when shutting down/restarting a RR the BP Windows process takes too long to close and eventually got force killed by Windows shutdown procedure?!

One of the 'solution' I found was to use shutdown script. Although the follow-up question to this reply was how this shutdown script should look like, remains unanswered. I wonder how a shutdown script may change this behavior when it, eg is triggered by the shutdown event in Windows Task Scheduler, as it may got force killed in the end too when BP Windows processes take too long to exit regularly. 

What comes into my mind is a 'indirect' shutdown by not using the standard logout, restart VBO but start a script instead that first tries to close BP Windows processes, wait some time and then initiates the shutdown/restart, ...?! This may work for Windows services but I am not aware of a command to close the RR process (ie the blue triangle in tray). Should we use 'taskkill' command (without force option)?

 Many thanks in advance,

 Walter

ps: I don't know if this is also applicable to BPE7 so I just chose BPE6 as 'Associated Products'. Please be so kind and state if the behavior and possible solution would be also valid for BPE7. In case I will be able to update this info to this post.

pp: Off-topic but I just wanted to mention that I miss the feature to group search results by their threads, which was possible in the 'old search' long long time ago. In my search I either got results from 2019 (ordered by most relevant) or got one page of results full with posts to one thread (ordered by date).

[Brigianakopec]

Hi,

In Blue Prism, if a RR shows as "Missing," it means the RR disconnected unexpectedly. "Offline" indicates it was logged out properly.

"Missing" usually happens when the RR doesn’t get a chance to close smoothly, often because it’s forced to shut down or the connection drops suddenly. For example, if Windows shuts down too quickly, Blue Prism might not have time to properly log off the RR, leading to the "Missing" status.

One way to help avoid this is by using a shutdown script. This script could close the RR process first, wait a moment, and then proceed with the Windows shutdown. That way, Blue Prism can log the RR out correctly, making it more likely to show as "Offline" instead of "Missing."

This approach works for both Blue Prism 6 and 7 since the handling of "Missing" and "Offline" statuses is similar across versions.

[Walter.Koller]

Hello,

Thanks a lot for your reply.

Is there any best practice on how to implement such a shutdown script? eg

• don't use Windows shutdown but start a script that closes BP (LoginAgent, RR) and then executes 'shutdown'
• add on log-off/shutdown triggered Windows scheduler task that just waits for a few seconds
• ...

LoginAgent process could be 'closed' by sc command. Should we use 'taskkill' for RR or might this still cause 'missing' or other issues?

Thanks

 Walter