Robots and error states
Recognizing and responding quickly to issues is essential in keeping applications running efficiently. The Pega Robot Manager™ portal and dashboard provide visual cues for any issues or problems that occur during the processing of unattended robotic automations by robots. The Robots landing page displays all robots in the system along with basic information, enabling the identification of potential problems.
In the following image, click the + icons to learn more about the Robots landing page features.
You can click the robot's name to open the robot detail page, which displays the error details, status, and failed assignments, as shown in the following figure:
Common causes of robot status alerts
The table below describes common causes of robot and assignment status alerts, with the parameters that you can adjust to resolve the alerts:
| Cause | Supervising parameter | Parameter settings location |
|---|---|---|
|
The number of assignments in queue equals or exceeds the configured threshold. |
Max capacity |
Assignment Type Threshold Settings |
|
The last automation took longer than expected to complete. |
Max automation run time (seconds) |
Assignment Type Threshold Settings |
|
The connection to the robot is lost, meaning that the robot didn't respond to the heartbeat signal. |
Heartbeat interval |
Settings > Configurations |
|
The number of assignments the robot has failed now exceeds the defined threshold. |
Consecutive failures threshold, Failed automations threshold |
Work Group Settings |
Note: Some of the issues above might occur because the application used to perform the automation is unavailable, or the automation doesn't utilize the application correctly. In these cases, adjusting the parameter might not fix the underlying cause.
Managing robots
To resolve robot issues, you need to understand the robot's settings and coordinate with the developers to provide any updates or changes to the robotic automation package. You can take the following main actions to manage a robot:
- Start the robot to process assignments when the robot is in a Standby state.
- Stop the robot to cease processing when there is an issue with either the robot or the assignment types associated with the robot Work Group.
- Move robots to different Work Groups to avoid any issues that might hamper production. You can also move robots when there are known peaks in workloads by creating a schedule, or by using auto-balancing.
- Update robots to assign new packages and versions for testing.
- Terminate unattended robots that the RPA Service controls if they do not respond to the Stop command. Termination should be the last option if Robot Manager fails to stop a robot gracefully.
Note: The availability of actions is based on robot status and can differ depending on the RPA Service and Runtime state. For more information, see Managing Robots.
Clean up disconnected robots
If the robots lose connectivity to Robot Manager, they no longer send a heartbeat signal and will then appear in an error state. If they cannot reconnect, you can de-register the affected robots using the ProcessStateRobots agent. For more information about de-registering unconnected robots, see Enabling automatic cleanup of disconnected robots.
Clean up stale assignments
The RoboticAssignmentProcessing agent finds stale automation assignments that have been in a robot's personal Work Queue for longer than expected and then moves them to the list of automations that have timed out. You can view automations that have timed out in Time-outs on the Issues page. For more information on cleaning up stale assignments, see Enabling automatic cleanup of stale automation assignments.
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