Milestones
Milestones are points in time that can be triggered when processing a ProcessStep. With these time triggers information within the ProcessStep can be gathered. This information can than be used to create a timeline of the processStep to determine:
- Where in the process are the bottlenecks
- Why is my process slow
- Is there room for improvement
- Which applications are slow
This will allow the Business and Operators to take action on the RPA Process or the procedure itself. It will allow the Operator to find problems within the process backed by actual data.
Milestone setup
We have a process that runs a simple process and do some steps.
Within the process Step several actions take place. We want to know how many seconds it takes from start of the application/action to the next one. The time measured between the two will be visible in the graph overview in the requestlog.
Milestone - Operator
As an Operator login into the Spider dashboard and navigate to ProcessSteps > Maintain. Edit a processStep where you would like to add Milestones on. The Operator can determine where the milestones are desired
Milestone - Developer
As RPA Developer you have to add the Milestone triggers to the desired places within your current processStep. The Milestone functionality is available from the Spider 1.6.12 version in V3 of the Worker API. This information is required:
- WorkloadId
- ProcessStepId
- MilestoneId
Milestone - Triggers
The Robot will request work from the Spider, then start the workload and process in this case Step_A. Just before we open the Webbrowser we trigger MilestoneId 1. Then when we start the Topdesk login we trigger MilestoneId 2. At this point we already can see in the requestlogging how long it took between the two.
Tip
A milestone can only be triggered within its own process Step. So you can not trigger MilestoneId 1 (which is set for ProcessStep 1) in Step_B.
Milestone - Logging
Now we have explained the milestones. Lets see it in action. We have processed a request and triggered the Milestones we have created in the previous step. In this example i set a delay timer of 3 or 4 seconds between the next trigger to demonstrate the processing time of an object.
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- Hover over the timeline to find when a milestone has been triggered.
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- Hover over the blue dot and the Title of the milestone will show up
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- Also the Processing time of the Object will show.
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- On the X-axis the total processing time of the ProcessStep will show as a timeline.
As you can see the total processing of the Step_A processSTep took around 15 seconds. Within the Step several actions have been taken place and by hovering over them we can see the processing time of that particulair Milestone.
Milestone - RFN
When a process step fails, the request can be put on RFN. From version 1.8.0, all previous milestones are removed from the request. However, the previous Milestones can still be found in the AuditTrailLog. As soon as the worker processes the request again, the Milestones will be triggered again and added in the same timeline
Milestone - Requestlogging
In the request log, you can also see you the Milestones that have been triggered.
Milestone - Demo
The GIF below shows the milestone information.
