Scheduling maintenance breaks

[mikkorah]

Hello,

Time to time VM resources and servers needs time for maintenance breaks. This can happen in scheduled (like once a month) or ad-hoc manner. 

It would be time-saving feature that you can schedule a maintenance breaks by resource / by pool. 

Why?

- Currently every schedule needs to be expired manually and they need to put back when the maintenance break is over.

- Normally these SQL server/ App-server maintenance breaks happens in night-time and they last from 1h up to 4h. 

- At environments, where are dozens or hundreds of schedules, this is taunting task to do on monthly basis. 

- By marking "maintenance break" for certain time slot -> Schedules do not try to start on that time interval. It will save manual work + night time runs will start after the marked maintenance breaks time slot is passed. 

- Process controller does not need to remember put the schedules back on next day.

[ChristianPanhan]

Great Idea.
In Addition: How about having an option to define maintenance windows and assign one ore more of those to a schedule?
For Example having two schedules:
Schedule 1: Uses Application A
Schedule 2: Uses Applications A, B, C
If we now set a maintenance for B only those schedule will not try to start.
Same could be done for the machines, the resource pc is running on.

[mikkorah]

Great addition Christian! 

In Blue Prism terms, this can be seen as object related. So that if certain target application has an maintenance break -> Mark objects / object folders as under maintenance and all scheduled processes which are using those objects will not try to start.

[MikkoKamppila]

Agree 100%. Meanwhile, you could add an extra step to your processes that checks periodically if a certain maintenance related environment variable is set to true.

Or, you could have a bit more complex syntax like:
DB;16.7.2021;21;23
Naturally, you can have multiple rows to cover various maintenance windows.

In a process, split the variable text and check
a) if today is the maintenance day for a DB and if,
b) is the process' current "exit" time set between 21-23.

If yes, then let the process set the exit to happen before 21. Or, if it's necessary to continue after the maintenance is over, just let the process sleep/wait until the maintenance end hour is reached.

Similar approach can be used to delay/avoid the unwanted launch of apps while the maintenance is ongoing.

Unfortunately while the process runs, it won't check the updated environment variables. But for the scheduled ones, it's ok.

[Martynas]

Similar idea is already raised, but I'd like to simplify it. Basically this:

Allow to set time window, when schedule execution is paused. E.g. "No schedules started every Monday 02:00AM ~ 05:00AM"

This would allow to easier plan server/database/runtime resources maintenance, prepare for updates and etc.


This could be a setting in BPServer.exe.config, BPServer GUI, or any other convenient place.

Regards