Hello humans.
I am curious if anyone has thoughts or ideas on how to best manage robot traffic without adding more robots to the pool (which is only a temporary fix).
So I was in the office today (a quiet office the weekend after Christmas)…
it was about 9 AM…
I creepily look in on Orchestrator to have a looksie (as I do often)…
and monitor any robot events that concern me or my team,
and what do I see?.. something so paralyzing, I sat there dumbfounded…
staring into the nothingness of what was and what should not be;
—it’s every RPA-goers’ worst nightmare!
All production robots had “scheduled” jobs running on them!
“Running”,“Running”,“Running”… it’s like the opening to an old B horror film
Let us assume that project design best practices were not the problem and that each process does efficiently take 1-2 hours to complete.
Let us also assume that we are restricted to 8-10 robots in production and that more will not be added at this time.
So, what do you think is the best approach to managing robot traffic, in order to avoid a scenario where jobs with longer completion times are taking up all available robots in the environment?
Is one idea to have a different environment in Orchestrator for longer completion times, so they can only use for example 8 of the 10 robots, rather than using up all 10? Then, use a different environment that utilizes all 10 for shorter process times? However, then you would likely cause a slight backlog of jobs that have longer process times. The trade-off is that you always have available robots for adhoc and shorter runtimes.
Another idea is for UiPath to add a feature where you can schedule jobs to use any robot but keep one (or specified number of) robot(s) available.
Note: this is currently being managed through version 2018.2.3, so there could be some added features in 2018.4 that I am not aware of.
So please post and discuss any ideas or thoughts you have on this topic.
Thanks.
Clayton.