Capturing screenshots for exception workflow just before exception to occur!

[Rahul_KumarSing]

When we run the Process 24/7. We often see exceptions. Some of which are in-frequent in nature but can't be ignored. We know any bad data, dynamic screen elements, pop-ups or slowness etc. can trigger the exception. But the root cause analysis require logs to be enabled and/or WebEx monitoring when logs are not enough.

Enabling stage Logging or WebEx are not an easy option for monitoring in-frequent issues as they demand more storage space and other approval/justifications depending on organization protocols.

However, having some sort of listener that can monitor the exception and provide series of screenshots for work flow 'Just Before' exception to occur can really speed up the root cause analysis process and make it simpler. We could achieve this by creating external listener that keep an eye on blue prism running session and exception flow. It would be great to have something similar in Blue prism itself.

[John__Carter]

Have you seen the 'Allow latest runtime resource screen capture' setting in System? Also, with careful ex handling design, you can capture a screenshot at the point of the terminating exception.

[vivek.kumar.goel]

Hi John, The "Allow latest ..." only keeps one screenshot and is overwritten when a new exception is hit.

I would rather suggest to use the screenshot utility inside the recovery blocks to store the screenshots.

[robert.nicklin]

Hi @Rahul_KumarSing,

Thanks for taking the time to raise this idea.

I find the suggestion of capturing pre-exception screenshots very interesting, but there's the obvious challenge that we (meaning Blue Prism) don't know when the exception is going to occur, so to actually enable this capability we'd need to start capturing screenshots a lot more often.

I have two initial questions:

1. Would you be willing to see an automation capture additional screenshots as part of it's normal running, as long as the only ones that were retained were the latest (i.e. the pre and post exception screenshots)?
2. I can imagine a lot of customers who would raise concerns with the idea that processes running in production were grabbing screenshots constantly, which makes me think that this needs to be something that a developer/tester/operator has to "opt in" to see happen on a session by session basis. Would that be an acceptable caveat to using this capability, in your opinion? I'm thinking of something much like this:
   • User creates pending session in Control Room
   • User right clicks pending session and selects "start session with screenshot capture"
   • On exception, user can then go the resource as normal and view exception screenshots, however because the session was ran with this new option enabled there would now be 2 or more screenshots

It's important to note that if we account for point 2 in a solution that we provide, there will be no way to run a session with screenshot capture programmatically, i.e. as part of a schedule, it would only be for debugging purposes. Thoughts?

I'm going to mark this idea as Needs More Info awaiting your feedback.

Regards,

Rob