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Spider Services

Among other things, Nidaros uses the SAIO platform in conjunction with the Spider.

Maintenance activities are scheduled by IT departments for the robots/virtual machines. In Spider, this is possible by creating a maintenance schedule for each workstation. On these days/times the robots are then put in an "Update" state. At that time the robots cannot retrieve work and are also not automatically (re)scheduled when logged out.

Once the time schedule expires, the Spider automatically picks it up and resets the robot to its previous state or automatically reschedules it so that the robot automatically resumes its work. In this way, no human interaction is required from an administrator.

Components

The service has two components.

Keep Alive Service

The Spider server is kept Active. Multiple Spider servers can be kept Active in this way. This service can be installed on any Windows server. This can be seen on the Spider itself in the hangfire jobs:

Hangfire status

HeartBeat Service

This is the HeartbeatService for the Robot. This service should be installed on every virtual machine that has a Robot account active on it.

The robot is automatically rescheduled Hangfire status

Hangfire status

Operation

Prerequisite: The workstation in the Spider is connected to a SAIO Unattended robot, VirtualMachine and Bot.

The Heartbeatservice returns the result of a qwinsta command to the Spider. The Spider then determines if a Robot is missing if a number of conditions are met:

  • The previous start time of the bot is at least 5 minutes ago.
  • It no longer appears in the 'qwinsta' output.
  • The Spider workstation does not have te state 'inUpdate'
  • The Spider workstation does not have te state 'inMaintemance'

The Spider then makes an API Call to the SAIO server to reschedule the robot. The Robot is scheduled to (start time previous script + 5 minutes). The bot script is then started 5 minutes later.

SAIO configuration

Installation Spider Service(s)

The installation and configuration of the Spider service(s) are not discussed here. The installation procedure can be found at https://customer.roboplatform.net or available upon request. The configuration regarding the Spider and SAIO will be discussed where necessary.