Overview of the Orchestration console

The Orchestrator console is a Single Page App that helps you monitor and execute your Orchestrator deployment. This article details the supported features in the Orchestrator 2022 console.

Navigation pane

The Navigation pane on the left shows the Runbook and Folders tree, like the one shown on the Runbook Designer. Unlike the console in earlier versions, you can't select the Folders, but you select the Runbooks and view their jobs and execute them.

The Navigation pane is always visible on all the screens to allow quick navigation to other runbooks and folders while remaining on the same screen.

To the right of the navigation pane, you can see the chosen screen. The Dashboard screen is shown by default.

Note

Currently, auto-refresh isn't supported for any of the screens. Reload the page manually.

Dashboard

The Dashboard shows Active jobs on the top followed by a table of all the Completed jobs (history). The Completed jobs (history) pane is collapsed by default, allowing focus on the active jobs.

Each row in both the panels corresponds to a unique job. A job may have one or more runbook instances. Each row shows:

• Job ID: Link to the Runbook
• Timestamps: The number of successful and failed instances is shown in one of the columns for all rows.
• Action buttons: Stop job or View Job details

You can select and expand each of the job rows and view the instances of the job.

Runbooks

When you select a runbook on the navigation tree or select a runbook link, the app navigates to the Runbook screen. The top panel lists out runbook metadata (editing status, timestamps, and so on). The Run button available on the screen allows you to queue the runbook for execution on the desired subset of runbook servers. The Run button is disabled for runbooks that aren't in Published state.

Below this panel is a tabbed view:

• View: For the Runbook graphical image.
• Jobs: For the list of active and completed jobs of the runbook (see below).
• Instances: For the list of active and completed instances of the runbook across all its Jobs (see below).

You can select the rows in the Jobs view just like the ones on the Dashboard screen. Jobs that are running can be stopped using the buttons on the right of the running row.

While this screen is active, you can choose a different runbook on the Navigation tree. This won't change the selected tab. You can quickly look at Jobs of different runbooks by selecting the jobs tab and navigating to the desired runbooks in the Navigation tree.

Jobs

When you select a job (using the (i) button), the app navigates to this screen. The top panel shows the job’s metadata (timestamps, parameters).

A table that shows the Instances of this job follows the panel.

Most jobs have a single Instance. If the runbook has a Monitor/Event trigger activity, then each trigger starts a unique job instance. The screenshot below shows a Job with more than one Instance.

Note

A Job can have at most one running Instance at any time. But since a Runbook can have many concurrently running Jobs, a Runbook can have more than one running Instance.

The status of the job is shown visually with the icons:

• Three dots: Job is queued
• Hourglass: Job is running
• Circle with slash: Job was canceled
• Tick: Job completed successfully
• Red exclamation: Job completed but failed
• Warning: Job completed with warning(s)

Instances

When you select an Instance (using the (i) button), the app navigates to this screen. The top panel shows the Instance's metadata (Job ID, timestamps, parameters, server that executes this instance).

The top panel also has three navigation buttons:

• Previous: View Instance that ran before this one.
• Next: View Instance that ran after this one.
• Latest: View most current instance

Note

The job ID is the same, and since the second instance is still running, the job is also still running.

Below the panel, you see the runbook diagram. You can select each runbook activity to view activity outputs. An icon dedicated for each activity denotes the status of that activity. When you select any activity, an overlay is shown on the right that lists the activity’s outputs.

Since an activity may be executed more than once within an instance (because of looping), each execution of the Activity has a unique Sequence number. The overlay lets you choose the Sequence # using the dropdown on the top.

Note

To ensure fast load time, only the first 10 activity outputs are loaded for the activity. The Load more button shows how many times this activity was executed, and you can select it to load more outputs.

The Instance and Activity status follow the same format as Job Status.

Execute runbooks

Navigate to the Runbook screen of the desired Runbook and select Run. An overlay form opens to the right where you're asked to:

• Set values to all input parameters (required)
• Choose the set of Runbook servers on which this Job can be scheduled.

Only one of these servers will actually execute this Job. To execute a Runbook on many servers, you'll have to run those many number of Jobs and explicitly set the servers one by one.

Note

Enter the parameters in the form, else the form won't be considered.

When the form is submitted, a disappearing popup is shown on the top right to notify whether the job was successfully queued or not.

Stop running Jobs

The Stop button is shown on the Dashboard and the Job screen. You will find a disappearing pop-up on the top-right of the page to confirm if a job is still running or if it has stopped.

FAQs

The Console doesn't load; error “Uh oh! Trouble connecting to WebApi [status 0]” appears

1. Check the browser’s developer console (Console tab), look for CORS errors (blocked by CORS policy).

   

2. If there are no CORS errors, check the Event Viewer logs (Application) on the Web API computer.

To fix CORS errors, you must ensure that the API’s web.config file must have a suitable CORS configuration. The browser error shows the origin value it is expecting in the Web API's web.config. Although domain names are case-insensitive, IIS CORS uses case-sensitive comparison test. Ensure that the origin value is in lowercase in the IIS CORS config.

Tip

A typical Web API IIS CORS config:

<add allowCredentials="true" maxAge="7200" origin="http://{domain}[:{port}]">
  <allowMethods>
    <add method="GET"/>
    <add method="PUT"/>
    <add method="POST"/>
    <add method="PATCH"/>
    <add method="DELETE"/>
  </allowMethods>
  <allowHeaders allowAllRequestedHeaders="true"/>
</add>

For details on how to configure CORS in web.config, see this article on CORS Module Configuration.

How do I update the Web API URL?

The Console loads {install_dir}\assets\configuration.json to find the API URL. You can edit it using a plain text editor. Ensure that there's no trailing / at the end of the URL.

Next steps

To learn more about deploying runbooks, see Deploy runbooks.