Monitoring and Restarting External Tasks

With a connection to the target system that is up and running and with the necessary configuration, you can monitor and restart external tasks from within the Automation Engine. This function is available for SAP process chains and PeopleSoft jobs.

When a process fails in the PeopleSoft or SAP systems, you can restart it from the Tasks list in the Process Monitoring perspective.

Note: In the case of PeopleSoft, if you restart a JOBD child, this child process is restarted with the same Instance Number as in the PeopleSoft system.

Prerequisites for Restarting PeopleSoft Tasks

Many PeopleSoft Jobs start multiple processes (sub jobs). These jobs have a parent/child structure in the PeopleSoft system that you can replicate in the Automic Web Interface. The commands of these Jobs contain two options that you must activate for this purpose:

Replicate Children
Process Ends with Error: Suspend

As a result, when the PeopleSoft Job is executed, it creates JOBD child tasks per started sub job. These tasks are displayed in the Tasks list in the Process Monitoring perspective.

Restarting PeopleSoft External Tasks (Remotely)

As a result, as soon as it is started, the PeopleSoft job creates a JOBD child task for each command at runtime. If one of those processes fails in PeopleSoft, the corresponding JOBD changes its status to ENDED_NOT_OK; the parent task, however, remains active. For example:

Important! Toggle the hierarchical view for the Tasks list in the Process Monitoring perspective to be able to see the parent/child task structure.

To restart the same instance of the process in PeopleSoft, right-click the failed process and select Remote Start. A new JOBD is created in the Automation Engine to represent it. For example:

If the process is now successful, both the second JOBD (in the screenshot above this is the task with RunID 1000014) and the job end normally.

If the restart fails again, the status of the second JOBD switches to ENDED_NOT_OK and you can restart it again.

This behavior is useful if the job is used in a Workflow and you have activated the Process Ends with Error: Suspend option. The Workflow does not continue processing until either the problem is solved (that is, the JOBD task can be restarted and it is processed correctly) or the job is canceled.