Login Agent - Does it kill automate.exe?

JamesACA

New Member
Hello everyone,

I've recently gotten into a new role for a company that uses the Blue Prism Login Agent. I did read the guides to understand how it works, however I still have some questions.

Context: We have a process. let's call it DumbSchedule process, that must run continuously all day so that we don't miss SLAs (I know this is not ideal and I am planning ways to get around this, however I must play with the cards I am dealt for now). Furthermore the logging in and logging out is not part of the process. Not sure if this is a best practice or not, however this does limit the use of resource pools, so another plan of mine, going forward, will be to include the logging in and out the machines in the process. This means in the scheduler the scheduler runs every 5 minutes. We are using Blue Prism Interact to load the queue, so the scheduler is set up like this
1. Login (Login Agent Process)
2. Process (Which can be a few seconds if there's no item)
3. Logout (Login Agent Process)

Now here is the problem. This schedule is setup similarly for many of our processes. This process, DumbSchedule, has it's runtime resource go offline at random times. The machine is not offline however the Automate.exe is not running (double checked by logging into the runtime resource and investigating). We also recently installed Dynatrace on some of our runtime resources to identify possible issues in our virtual environment. I noticed that the Automate.exe gets launched multiple times a day.

Through my previous work experiences we did not use a login agent, so the automate.exe file would only have to be launched once at bootup. Here it seems like it is launched multiple times. This leads me to some questions:

- Is this a best practice to launch it at login in every time? I googled the issue and from this thread it seems like it.
- Does logging off kill/close the Automate.exe? I don't see it in the object code, nor mentioned anywhere else, but I am not sure why the Automate.exe would not be running.
 

Mikkora

New Member
Hello,

Q1) It is mandatory that you will launch automate.exe every time when logged in to resource. Otherwise, the resource stays offline in Blue Prism. Best way to do this is to use shortcut in common startup-folder, with target: "C:\Program Files\Blue Prism Limited\Blue Prism Automate\Automate.exe" /resourcepc /public /dbconname "Your-connection-name-here"

By this, your runtime resource will open the Blue Prism connection as resourcepc, and it should be available in control room as well.

Q2) Logging off will kill the automate.exe. When logging out, automate.exe will be closed and login agent service should be active.

Additional notes which may help you:
- IF you run default logout-process to already logged out resource -> Resource will go offline. Workaround is to modify your BP -default login process so that it will check is resource already logged in.
- If you want to keep your resource online all the time and no need to logout in the meantime, I recommend that you will generate 3 different schedules:
1) Login (whenever the resource need to be logged in), recurring daily like at 00:05:00
2) DumbProcess schedule, interval ie every 5 minutes, between 00:10:00-23:50:00
3) Logout, recurring daily at 23:50:00

Br, Mikko
 

JamesACA

New Member
Hello,

Q1) It is mandatory that you will launch automate.exe every time when logged in to resource. Otherwise, the resource stays offline in Blue Prism. Best way to do this is to use shortcut in common startup-folder, with target: "C:\Program Files\Blue Prism Limited\Blue Prism Automate\Automate.exe" /resourcepc /public /dbconname "Your-connection-name-here"

By this, your runtime resource will open the Blue Prism connection as resourcepc, and it should be available in control room as well.

Q2) Logging off will kill the automate.exe. When logging out, automate.exe will be closed and login agent service should be active.

Additional notes which may help you:
- IF you run default logout-process to already logged out resource -> Resource will go offline. Workaround is to modify your BP -default login process so that it will check is resource already logged in.
- If you want to keep your resource online all the time and no need to logout in the meantime, I recommend that you will generate 3 different schedules:
1) Login (whenever the resource need to be logged in), recurring daily like at 00:05:00
2) DumbProcess schedule, interval ie every 5 minutes, between 00:10:00-23:50:00
3) Logout, recurring daily at 23:50:00

Br, Mikko
Great thanks for this advice, I will follow up with the changes and see if it helps!
 
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