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CA Clarity Tuesday Tip:  Process Engine icon almost always grey

  • 1.  CA Clarity Tuesday Tip:  Process Engine icon almost always grey

    Broadcom Employee
    Posted Oct 30, 2012 06:52 PM
    TITLE: Process Engine icon on the Process Engines page is almost always grey or Process Engine stats don’t show

    NOTE: This issue only applies to Clarity 13.0 and above. It is a known bug that will be fixed in a future version of Clarity

    DESCRIPTION:

    Due to a change made to limit the amount of contention on the NMS_MESSAGES and NMS_MESSAGE_DELIVERY tables, the application services NMS Message Receiver threads no longer wake up when a multicast BPM event is sent. As a result, the process engine statistics and status become stale in the app UI.

    TECHNICAL DETAILS:

    The "Process Engines" page on the Administrative side of the UI is driven by a BPM event that provides process engine statistics back to the application. In 12.x and earlier, the application woke up to every multicast event. A previous bug fix removed the ability of the application to wake up to a BPM event and BPM events are only consumed at startup when messages from NMS_MESSAGES are delivered to the app instance.

    The one BPM event the app needs to receive is the process engine statistics message (OBJECT_CODE = 'pe_monitor' in NMS_MESSAGES). But because the thread never wakes up for a multicast event, these messages exist in NMS_MESSAGES but never get consumed by the app and because of this are not displayed on the Process Engines page.


    STEPS TO REPLICATE:

    1) launch a v13 app and bg instance (bg is process engine enabled)
    2) Navigate in the app to "Process Engines" and wait a few minutes
    3) Verify the status of the process engine and click the process engine name to get detailed statistics

    EXPECTED RESULTS:

    Status will be yellow indicating the PE is up and process engine statistics will be present

    ACTUAL RESULTS:

    Process engine status is grey and no statistics are available, yet rows exist in NMS_MESSAGES for object_code = 'pe_monitor'

    WORKAROUND:

    Modify the pipelines for the process engine (change any value) and hit
    save. This will wake up the NMS Message Receiver thread in the app and you
    will now see the status = yellow and updated statistics

    1. Log into Clarity and go to the Process Engines page on the admin side
    of Clarity.

    2. Click on the name of the process engine that is not showing stats

    3. Click on the Configure pipelines button

    4. Make a change and click the submit button.

    SUGGESTION:

    When you click on Configure pipelines, change the Pre-Condition pipeline since this is the least used pipeline. I suggest, increasing it by one, saving the change and then changing it back to the original setting. Alternatively you could add one the first time you change it and subtract one the next time you change it so that you are hovering at close to the same number all of the time.


  • 2.  RE: CA Clarity Tuesday Tip:  Process Engine icon almost always grey

     
    Posted Oct 31, 2012 12:33 PM
    Thanks for the great tip Jeanne! :grin:


  • 3.  RE: CA Clarity Tuesday Tip:  Process Engine icon almost always grey

    Posted Nov 12, 2012 05:43 AM
    Doe this hold true for V13.1 as well ?

    NJ


  • 4.  RE: CA Clarity Tuesday Tip:  Process Engine icon almost always grey

    Broadcom Employee
    Posted Nov 15, 2012 11:17 AM
    Yes, this would apply to V13.1 as well.


  • 5.  RE: CA Clarity Tuesday Tip:  Process Engine icon almost always grey

    Posted Nov 14, 2012 01:31 PM
    Does this impact the time it takes for a process to kick off? We are noticing that certain processes that kick off on create/update events take a few minutes to get triggered. As soon as they are triggered they finish immediately, it just takes time to trigger.

    After configuring the pipelines, it seemed that this issue disappeared and processes were being triggered immediately.


  • 6.  RE: CA Clarity Tuesday Tip:  Process Engine icon almost always grey

    Broadcom Employee
    Posted Nov 15, 2012 11:19 AM
    Feras,

    The problem you are describing does not appear to be related to this issue.


  • 7.  RE: CA Clarity Tuesday Tip:  Process Engine icon almost always grey

    Posted Nov 15, 2012 12:47 PM
    Thanks Jeanne!