Workflow failure escalation

[John O'Mullane]

Hi,
I have always thought that if I want to execute a Notification when my Workflow fails, the place to set this up was within the "Runtime" tab, just like I would do for my many Unix Jobs.

What I have discovered recently is when my Workflows fail, meaning one of the tasks has failed, and my dependencies are setup to abort the complete workflow in that situation, my Notifications are not being triggered because the return code of my workflow is still 0.

So, all along it looks like I've been configuring my workflows incorrectly as I now can't see any instance when my Workflow will fail with Return code > 0 unless I set in myself from within the workflow.

I do understand that there is an option within the "Attributes" tab to kick off a Notification based on the "Task Result Evaluation" option.

Is my understand correct here?

Workflows that fail "Ended-Not-Ok - aborted" will never have return code of >0??

John.

[Pete Wirfs]

Can't say I've ever tested this.  It would never have crossed my mind to think there would be a use-case where a workflow could throw a non-zero return code.   State (i.e. Ended_OK) is very different concept than return code.  Seems to me a script to check the state in a post-process script would make sense.  But I'm in V11.2, and I don't see post-process scripting as a workflow option(?)  The result evaluation feature looks somewhat promising, but I've never used it.  We do all of our error handling at the job level.

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Pete (AE V11.2)
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[Scott Hughes]

The SLO engine can work for this use case.  It isn't so great with end by times (it does it but some use cases spanning midnight on starting by and ending by are bad).  It will monitor end codes of all executables and give you rich filtering capability so you don't have to configure each job or workflow ...  You also get a tab in process monitoring for service fulfillment and that data can be charted in analytics dashboards.

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Scott Hughes
Senior Automation Engineer
Verizon
Albuquerque, NM
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[Kim Sorgalla]

Hi John,

you should use the task result evaluation section, as you already mentioned. That's what we use to trigger notifications. Keep in mind that your workflow only gets the state EndedNotOk, when the workflows' <END> task is failing. So double check the dependency setting there. 

So far i rarely use return codes for anything. Only e.g. for unix jobs to handle errors based on the system return code provided by the unix agent.

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Software Engineering Analyst
Accenture Technology Solutions
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