Maintaining the Process Engine in Clarity

Products

• Clarity PPM On Premise
• Clarity PPM SaaS

Issue/Introduction

Every Clarity customer who uses processes (workflows) should have a process engine maintenance policy that defines how long old processes should be kept. This KB Article provides some guidelines / recommendations in maintaining a process engine. 

If too many completed processes are allowed to build up, then this can cause performance problems with accessing the Initiated Processes tab. When there are too many rows in the process tables, it eventually slows down performance. The reason is that the processes that are in an error state are loaded each time the process engine is restarted, further adding to the process load time.

Environment

Release: All Supported Releases

Resolution

1. Delete old processes in the Done or Aborted state.
   
   • Decide on and set a policy for how long records are to be retained for these processes. 
   • If regular backups of the Clarity database are taken, the archived information needs to be accessed.
   • Once the policy has been decided and set, run or schedule the Delete Process Instance job.
   • Make sure to select specific dates so that only 5000 or less process instances are being deleted with each job run.
   • NOTE: Schedule two separate jobs, i.e. one for processes in the 'Done' status and another for 'Aborted' status.
2. Retry or Abort and Delete old processes in the Error state.

• • Navigate to the Administration > Data Administration > Initiated Processes tab and search for processes in the 'Error' status.
  • If the process instance is not needed, proceed to abort the process instance.
  • Check for any processes that are repetitively in the 'Error' status.
    • If all or many instances of the process are failing, this is an indicator that the processes may have an issue with logic.
    • When the problem is suspected to be an issue with ​logic, set the process on hold until it can be fixed.
    • It is a good idea to go back to the process developer and ask that the process logic be fixed.
    • A good best practice is to request a modified version of the fixed process so that it run on all of the object instances where it failed so that the process can complete.
  • If the process is still needed, double-click the error icon under the Messages column to find out what the error is.
    • If a checkbox exists next to the step, it means the problem is likely to be something that can be fixed.
    • Read the error message and look at the process details page by going back to the list view and click on the process id to determine what the problem is.
    • Proceed to go to the object instance indicated in the list view and fix the problem.
    • Once the problem is fixed,  click back into the error icon, click the checkbox beside the step and click the retry button.
    • If it was a temporary error, the step will succeed and the process will continue.

NOTE:  If the process problem cannot be determined, please contact the Support team for assistance.

   3. Once all the errored processes are cleaned up, run the Delete Process Instance job with the Aborted status selected will clean up the aborted processes.