Orchestrator - Feedback

Hello, everyone!

I’m Ioana, UX Designer in the Orchestrator team. Right now we’re currently in the middle of an extensive research effort and we would be grateful for some input on any or all of the following questions:

  1. Who uses Orchestrator in your company and with what purpose? What’s the primary function of Orchestrator for you?
  2. How often do you use Orchestrator → for what actions?
  3. Can you describe some of the experiences you’ve had with Orchestrator?
  4. Is there any way Orchestrator is not supporting your needs currently?
  5. Did you find anything that was unclear? How did you find out what you need to do?
  6. Did you have any frustrations while using the app? Can you describe when / how / what you were doing?
  7. What do you like about Orchestrator (if anything) - what can be improved?
  8. Any other general feedback / ideas

Thank you for your help and involvement!
Ioana

21 Likes

Hi,

See my answers inline in red.

···
  1. Who uses Orchestrator in your company and with what purpose? What’s the primary function of Orchestrator for you?

We are using the Orchastrator as a DevOps team of the robots. We are testing new processes that are developed by our partner cognizant and maintain the production orchestrator so robots will run as planned.

  1. How often do you use Orchestrator → for what actions?

Daily. Asset maintenance, start jobs, register robots, maintaining schedules etc.

  1. Can you describe some of the experiences you’ve had with Orchestrator?

N/A

  1. Is there any way Orchestrator is not supporting your needs currently?
  1. Importing/exporting assets

  2. Searching on asset values

  3. Automatic AD-Group sync (and delete users that are removed from the group)

  4. Holiday calendar in schedules

  5. Email notifications (failures, alerts like robot is running for more than X hours, robot is pending for more than X hours)

  6. Dashboards (when do my robots run what processes)

  7. Automatic transportation from one Orchestrator to another (package move from A to P including configuration like assets)

  8. Filtering on all values available in the overview (and filter on multiple values e.g. “running and pending jobs”)

  9. Customizable colors from the UI, (now we changed the css to identify acceptance/production enviromment)

  1. Did you find anything that was unclear? How did you find out what you need to do?

N/A

  1. Did you have any frustrations while using the app? Can you describe when / how / what you were doing?

N/A

  1. What do you like about Orchestrator (if anything) - what can be improved?

See 4

  1. Any other general feedback / ideas

We have version 2018.2 now and will upgrade to 2019.10. So I am not sure if some of the features are already included. Hope so
J

Met vriendelijke groet/ kind regards,

Robert van Uden

Finance Intelligence & Innovation

Van: Ioana Teleanu via UiPath Community Forum uipath@discoursemail.com
Verzonden: donderdag 10 oktober 2019 13:16
Aan: Uden van, RPH (Robert) Robert.van.Uden@rabobank.nl
Onderwerp: UiPath Forum [PM] Orchestrator - Feedback

IoanaTeleanu
UiPath

October 10

Hello, everyone!

I’m Ioana, UX Designer in the Orchestrator team. Right now we’re currently in the middle of an extensive research effort and we would be grateful for some input on any or all of the following questions:

  1. Who uses Orchestrator in your company and with what purpose? What’s the primary function of Orchestrator for you?

  2. How often do you use Orchestrator → for what actions?

  3. Can you describe some of the experiences you’ve had with Orchestrator?

  4. Is there any way Orchestrator is not supporting your needs currently?

  5. Did you find anything that was unclear? How did you find out what you need to do?

  6. Did you have any frustrations while using the app? Can you describe when / how / what you were doing?

  7. What do you like about Orchestrator (if anything) - what can be improved?

  8. Any other general feedback / ideas

Thank you for your help and involvement!
Ioana


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3 Likes

please see my input on quote

4 Likes

Hello Ioanna,

What do you like about Orchestrator (if anything) - what can be improved?

Logs date, some times logs aren’t right because the orchestrator only reads until seconds and some of this logs have micro seconds of difference which can lead to wrong readments.

Would be interesting if Orchestrator could be linked to git and when you merged new content into a master branch would also upload inside Orchestrator.

Regards,
Diogo Nunes

4 Likes

hi @IoanaTeleanu
Please find my reply in quotes for all the questions :slight_smile:

  • Who uses Orchestrator in your company and with what purpose? What’s the primary function of Orchestrator for you?

I am a developer in the company I work, so I end up usually setting the environment for the client to access… Orchestrator is used by them and me for checking the logs of the robot and seeing if all is working well or not :slight_smile:

  • How often do you use Orchestrator → for what actions?

Usually on a daily basis, if the client is doing UAT :stuck_out_tongue:

  • Can you describe some of the experiences you’ve had with Orchestrator?

Great tool, easy to connect and get info of all the robots deployed

  • Is there any way Orchestrator is not supporting your needs currently?

System Password update is the feature I think must be supported… I mean the machines connected to the Orchestrator must have access to update system passwords.

  • Did you find anything that was unclear? How did you find out what you need to do?
  • Did you have any frustrations while using the app? Can you describe when / how / what you were doing?

Reading logs sometime

  • What do you like about Orchestrator (if anything) - what can be improved?

The monitor queue, I think it must have a bit more visualisation like Kibana

  • Any other general feedback / ideas

Would be great if the tool in it self give all logs report like Kibana, saying so it would be a tool all in it self :slight_smile:

5 Likes

I use the Orchestrator daily to manage jobs on multiple robots my current pain points are:
The scheduler cannot be scheduled with customized number of minutes i.e. I can schedule 5, 10 or 15 minutes but not 3 or 8 etc.
An issue that is huge for me is when the scheduler runs a job every 5 minutes all day every day checking the queue for a transaction if there is none of course nothing happens but if it does process a transaction and there is an error it is next to impossible to find the job that ran it. One thing that could help is instead of run started and run ended being a ‘1 day ago’, ‘1 hour ago’ etc perhaps more specificity with the time stamp or a true duration field would help me locate transaction logs I need.

Also separating event notifications to allow me to subscribe to events for specific jobs, or environments or even specific robots rather than an all or nothing model. In general more customization of alerts.

Import/Export of assets

4 Likes

Dear Ioana,

Here are my responses to these questions about Orchestrator: (Note we are running 2018.3.3… my apologies if some of these items have already been addressed)

  1. Who uses Orchestrator in your company and with what purpose? What’s the primary function of Orchestrator for you?

The Robotic Automation CoE team members, Production Support, Platform support teams and a select few users who implemented robots for their own team. The primary function of Orchestrator is to manage Assets, trigger the scheduled robots and manually trigger jobs. (Note: End-user triggered jobs are done through a custom SharePoint add-in we designed which uses the REST API. This approach allows us to offer more granular access management options leveraging Active Directory groups and automated user management options)

  1. How often do you use Orchestrator → for what actions?

Daily to review running jobs, schedules, trigger new jobs, check queues and pending jobs.

  1. Can you describe some of the experiences you’ve had with Orchestrator?

Overall positive. The most recent UI Framework update made it perform a lot better. Still has some quirks.

  1. Is there any way Orchestrator is not supporting your needs currently?

- Need to add support for Active Directory groups to manage users back in – I appreciate the more granular controls for access, however managing individual users is a PAIN. A static import of an Active Directory group is not a good long term solution.

User interface quirks:

  • Should have the ability to filter on ANY column in the views
  • Should have the ability to save quick filters
  • On Schedule screen – next run time should be a sortable column!
  • number of rows to display per screen should be a global and persistent setting (and 10 should definitely not be the default!)
  • In progress and remaining columns in Queue screen should be sortable
  • Installed version should be filterable on Machines screen
  • On the Dashboard page, there is no way to specify a time period for the Jobs Pie chart
  • Application Exception should be Red, and Business Exception Amber (in my opinion… or make the colors configurable)
  1. Did you find anything that was unclear? How did you find out what you need to do?
  • Having environments no longer at the top level is left hand navigation is a pain
  • Not being able to quickly see which robots are in an environment from the Robots screen
  1. Did you have any frustrations while using the app? Can you describe when / how / what you were doing?

Have not used the app.

  1. What do you like about Orchestrator (if anything) - what can be improved?

Orchestrator works well and is quite responsive as an application. There are some UI elements which need improvement (see answer to question 4)

  1. Any other general feedback / ideas

Overall Orchestrator has come a long way from the early versions we started using almost 4 years ago! However it still has some way to go in terms of fit and finish.

6 Likes

Hello @IoanaTeleanu

I’m a developer, solution architect in my company for RPA. So these are my answers.

We used Orchestrator for internal automations initially. Now with the look out for new projects, we are introducing the Orchestrator to the client that we are trying to get a RPA project done. This is mainly used to manage multiple robots, scheduling and also real-time tracking of the progress of the jobs that are performed by the robots

Usually weekly. Specially when there is a requirement to track the progress of the jobs and to perform UAT.

It’s the best tool to connect multiple robots, and manage their tasks while monitoring the process in real-time. The interfaces of the real-time monitoring allows us to easily track what is happening and if an error occur somewhere, it’s easy to track where and what happened. It’s a awesome tool to have

Yes. Date and Time formats while scheduling is not quite supportive for our needs here.
We also need more filtering on monitoring and also the ability to few some history like on a monthly, weekly, daily, hourly basis

Not really… :slight_smile:

Reading logs is a bit of a problem. It is kind of confusing at times and it is difficult to get a clear idea

I mostly like the queue monitoring feature. I use it almost all the time to track what is happening there.

9 Likes

Hi Ioana,

I think some server level settings (e.g. [inProgressMaxNumberOfMinutes]) could be ‘moved’ to different level (for this example at Queue level)

Thanks

2 Likes

Thank you for your valuable answers, Robert, they help us a lot! I appreciate the time you took to go through the questions!

1 Like

Thank you very much for taking the time and providing us with these valuable answers!

1 Like

Hello, Diogo! Thanks for your ideas! Sounds great, will look into them!

1 Like

Awesome feedback, thanks for the effort! We appreciate it!

3 Likes

Thank you for your insights, we’ll look into your ideas and we really appreciate this!

1 Like

Thank you so much for your extensive input and effort, greatly appreciated! A lot of ideas totally worth exploring, we’re on it!

3 Likes

Hello, awesome insights & suggestions, thank you for taking the time to answer, it helps us a lot!

4 Likes

Thank you, Doru! We’ll look into that!

2 Likes

Dear @IoanaTeleanu,

Much appreciated, below is my team feedback after deploying 30 Processes in PROD-

  1. We have Developers team of 10 & 5 Leads monitor Logs and track the records/Queue statuses, updates Assets.
  2. Using Orchestrator every day 1-2 hrs during work hours.
  3. Faced many challenges to pull appropriate logs at times.
  4. Need to filter Logs of a process by Selecting Date filter. Currently we have (last hour, last day, last week, last month)
  5. Most of the Date stamps in Orchestrator gives us the time range(5 mins ago, 20 mins ago) instead the time. ex. If a Job says - successfully executed 23 days ago. To which I should calculate -23 days from today to get the date
  6. NA
  7. NA
  8. Logs of a process based on date I need. Schedules Options that meets few more demands of Clients

Thanks,
Vikas Reddy

5 Likes
  • Essentially me, for the purpose of monitoring executions and withdraw data for reporting
  • I use hourly average to monitor the processes running.
  • We recently updated to 2019.4, we also updated the license to include development studios. We have been trying to use PowerBI to pull data from the Orchestrator.
  • At this time the Orchestrator does not meet our reporting needs. We can only observe information from the day itself and cannot extract it.
  • In foruns or open tickets to UiPath
  • I can’t use the app because I only have access to the Orchestrator within the office network.

Best regards

3 Likes

I think the areas that need improvement are:

  • Installation - needs to be much simpler for a standard setup. Yes, it needs to be possible to change the configuration but getting started easily is essential.

  • There needs to be a “Gantt” chart type display showing what is scheduled for when.

  • There needs to be a “Capacity” type display, showing utilisation of machines and robots.

Regards, Dave

7 Likes