Getting Started with Automic Automation for Operators: Monitor

As an operator, you keep an eye on processes and make sure that the workload gets processed every day, smoothly and without incidents. You identify problems and assume their ownership. To be able to remediate them, you perform basic root-cause analysis, you determine the best course of action and the next steps. You react to failures either by involving other users, notifying the management team or by escalating to the owner of a process. The bulk of your work revolves around tasks.

A task is an instance of an executed object or of an object that is currently being executed. Task have defining properties such as runID (unique number that identifies an execution or run), object type, start time, end time, activation status, current status, and so forth. Every instance of an executed object is a task. That is, if an object is executed 10 times, this creates 10 different tasks, each of them with its own properties.

There are different types of tasks for different types of objects. Some objects, when executed, create stand-alone tasks, for example Jobs, File Transfers or Scripts. Others, such as Workflows or Schedules, integrate stand-alone objects within themselves to automate or sequence workload processing. When they are execute, they generate parent tasks (the Workflow or Schedule) and child tasks (the stand-alone tasks that they contain).

The Automic Web Interface provides various monitoring areas depending on your system configuration and on your company's policy in terms of rights. The Process Monitoring perspective is where you have all available monitoring tools and functions. The My Catalog perspective is also a valuable dashboard for monitoring the tasks you are entitled to work with. However, as it provides less functionality, we will not deal with it in this Getting Started. This list outlines the available monitoring areas:

• Process Monitoring perspective, which gives you the full range of possibilities to monitor, analyze, identify problems and remediate them. For more information, see Walkthrough of the Process Monitoring Perspective.

• Home or Dashboards perspective, which is the perspective that you see when you first log in to Automic Web Interface. You system administrator may have already partially configured it for you so that you have access to some objects and functions. The Dashboards perspective gives quick access to customized views. Dashboards are pages with one or more windows (widgets) that contain different kinds of information and links. If you have the necessary rights, you can add Dashboards. For more information, see Walkthrough of the Dashboards.

• My Catalog, which is your personal, interactive dashboard. For more information, see Walkthrough of the My Catalog Perspective.

These topics are a Getting Started guide for both developers and object designers, and for operators (business users) and managers. From an object designer perspective, monitoring objects after creating and configuring them is key to ensure that they behave as expected. From an operator and manager perspective, your daily business consists of monitoring and analyzing tasks (both active and ended) and reacting in case of problems, in accordance with your rights and privileges.

If you have not read the Getting Started with Automic Automation for Object Designers: Initial Design section of the Getting Started guide yet, do it now. In this section, we will refer to the objects that we have created there.

Important! Check Broadcom Software Academy. There is a course available for this topic. For more information, see the Education section at the end of this page.

Monitoring Tools in the Process Monitoring Perspective

The Process Monitoring perspective contains multiple tools to enable operators. This list outlines them and provides links to their descriptions:

• List of tasks

  As soon as an object is executed, it is displayed as a task in the Process Monitoring perspective, where you can check its status and the status of its children (if available). This list provides key execution and status data. From this list you access all functions available for the task. For more information see:

  • Tasks

  • Understanding the Task List

• Reports

  Each execution generates files and reports with information about the status of the execution, what happened during processing and so on. There are various types of reports depending on the type of task. For more information, see Understanding the Reports. See also Analyzing Reports with Automic Automation's Gen AI.

• Execution Lists

  Every time that a task is executed, the information about a particular execution is stored. The Executions list provides historical information about all the executions of a task so, for example, if a task is executed 10 times, each execution is a row in the list. For more information, see Execution Data. See also Analyzing Executions with Automic Automation's Gen AI.

• Monitors

  Many task types have their own monitor view. Combined with the list of Executions and with the reports, the monitors provide all the information you need to understand how tasks behave. The monitors are different for each type of task and contain task-specific options. For more information, see:

  • Monitoring Events

  • Monitoring Jobs

  • Monitoring Workflows

  • Monitoring Schedules

  • Monitoring Sync Objects

  • Monitoring Job Groups

  • Monitoring Agent Groups

  • Service Level Management: Monitoring Services

  • Monitoring and Restarting External Tasks

See also Troubleshooting, Root-Cause Analysis and Remediation.

Analyzing Executions and Troubleshooting with Automic Automation's Gen AI

Automic Automation's Gen AI capabilities can assist you when investigating why tasks failed by summarizing the content of complex reports, analyzing and explaining executions, pointing out errors and providing potential solutions explaining scripts, and much more. You can have conversations in natural language with Automic Automation's Gen AI in any language, irrespective of the language of your Automic Automation environment.

For more information, see:

• Automic Automation's Generative AI Capabilities

• Analyzing Reports with Automic Automation's Gen AI

• Analyzing Executions with Automic Automation's Gen AI

• Analyzing Scripts with Automic Automation's Gen AI

Education

The Broadcom Software Academy provides a wide range of free online trainings. For information about how to navigate through the Academy and on how to register for courses, see Free Online Courses.

The following course(s) are associated with this topic:

• Automic Automation: The Anatomy of Task Execution

• Automic Automation - Task Management