March 2022

24 March 2022

Encryption

In a continuous process to keep your data safe, starting with this release, we encrypt all types of newly created assets by default. Additionally, you now have the option to encrypt newly created queues. However, the encryption is not applicable retroactively.

The following columns are encrypted in the corresponding database tables:

Database table

Encrypted columns

Encryption method

QueueItems

Specific Data

Output

Optional via UI (Creating a queue)

AssetValues

Value

By default

23 March 2022

Monitoring Improvements

Monitoring folder resources from a centralized location

From now on, you can keep an eye on the health and state of the resources in all your folders from a centralized location at the tenant level. The new Monitoring page allows you to visualize data in your system via a collection of dashboards that are grouped together based on a certain dimension.

The new functionality should be quite familiar to you; its looks and behavior are based on its folder-scoped counterpart. And this is not a coincidence, because tenant monitoring dashboards display aggregated data from all folders and personal workspaces in which you have access.

Bringing together all monitoring functionality in one place also required us to do a little reorg of the Orchestrator UI, so here's a list of the things that have been relocated to the new tenant monitoring page:

Unattended sessions and User sessions pages (originally on Tenant > Robots);
Robot usage widget (originally on Tenant > License).

New filtering options when monitoring processes

Now, when monitoring processes, you have the possibility to filter the data by bigger time intervals: 1 month (last 30 days) or 1 week (last 7 days). Previously, you could only filter by the last hour or last day.

Persisting filters

Previously, Orchestrator did not persist selected filters on Monitoring dashboards which could prove wasteful since you had to redo the configuration every time you switched tabs. You can now navigate away from the dashboards and find the same filter configuration applied upon returning.

Robot Authentication New Look

This release brings a fresh look of robot authentication settings. We rearranged the options a lil' bit and made attended robot authentication read-only when user licensing is enabled.

Known Issues

The response body of the GET /odata/Releases endpoint may wrongfully return IsLatestVersion as False. To make sure the returned value of the IsLatestVersion key is correct, use $expand or $select query parameters, as follows:

/odata/Releases/$expand=CurrentVersion
/odata/Releases/$select=IsLatestVersion

Bug Fixes

The names of manually uploaded packages were not displayed in the Audit details. This issue affected packages uploaded both individually and in bulk. Now, the names of all uploaded packages are successfully logged in the Audit details.
You could not assign robot accounts to a folder if prior to navigating to the tenant level the last folder selected was a classic folder. The main symptom was that when looking for a robot account to assign, the robot account was not displayed even if it existed.

17 March 2022

Organizing Resources With Tags

We know it can be quite a pain to categorize resources and we recognize the importance of having everyone in your company easily see the dependencies between these resources and know how to use them together. Changing an asset or deleting a queue, for example, could impact running processes and unbeknownst to you, cause them to crash.

As your robot fleet grows, the number of resources to consume and manage expands, so your business can run into some significant challenges. Some of these challenges include:

difficulties in figuring out how the various objects work with each other;
increased manual workload: you need to come up with cumbersome workarounds to categorize and track the dependencies between objects, such as Excel spreadsheets;
no visibility into how your actions could impact other resources such as running processes;
no visibility into the potential downtime brought by upgrading an application targeted by your automations, since there’s no easy way to see what processes are employing that app.

Tags come to your aid in a number of areas:

Increasing developer productivity: Help developers identify which resources are relevant for them. They become able to focus on adding value rather than spending an infinity looking for that one piece of process they might be impacting.
Increasing administrator productivity: With a consistent tags structure across your organization you can start creating a unified taxonomy that will help everyone find resources faster.

Note: Tagging is currently available for several Orchestrator resources. See the list of taggable objects.

Learn about the benefits of using tags in the Orchestrator guide.

Known Issue

Set Asset and Set Credentials activities version 2021.4 or lower remove tags from assets.

Global Tenant Search

We've added a global search functionality that lets you search for resources in a tenant. It looks for both folder and tenant resources in that tenant. Currently, the search works for queues, assets, buckets, machine objects, processes, triggers, and action catalogs.

To access it, select the Search icon in the upper-right corner of any page.

You can filter the results by type, location, labels and properties.

Note: The search is tenant-scoped, even though you can also access it from a folder context.

15 March 2022

Hostname Mappings in Triggers

Recently introduced in triggers, the account-machine-hostname mapping allows you to select a specific machine from a template to schedule your job execution. Why would you need to select a hostname? Because that specific hostname (i.e., workstation) has the resources - licenses, software, user configuration, permissions - required by your job to execute smoothly. You can select a hostname for your trigger as part of the trigger execution target, and have it either dynamically allocated or manually mapped in a valid account-machine mapping, in the exact way you choose a hostname for jobs.

However, there are a couple of twists in selecting a hostname for triggers:

you can select any available hostname of the template, whereas in jobs you can select only connected machines.
you can duplicate an existing trigger and add a hostname to it, thus doubling the number of jobs queued for execution.

Find out more details in our documentation pages: About triggers and Managing triggers.

Complete Process Creation Flow

Until today, to execute a newly created process, you went to the Jobs or Processes page; to schedule a trigger for the same process, you went to the Triggers page. Do not wander between Automations pages anymore, as now you have the option to finalize a process creation in a single flow: after creating the process, you can start the job or create the trigger with one click.

Machine Keys for PW Templates No Longer Visible

Machine keys for personal workspace machine templates are no longer visible, neither via API nor in the Orchestrator user interface. What this means for you is you have to sign in to connect your robot to Orchestrator.

8 March 2022

Happy International Women's Day! May you stay strong and with a delicate touch.

New Credential Store Now Available

A read-only flavor of the Azure Key Vault credential store is now integrated with Orchestrator. For configuration instructions, see Azure Key Vault integration.

Roles and Permissions

Tenant Administrator is now Orchestrator Administrator

To better describe the scope of rights included with this default role, we have renamed the Tenant Administrator role to Orchestrator Administrator.

This role is also impacted by the rename of customized default roles, so you now have:

Orchestrator Administrator: the read-only default role that was previously named Tenant Administrator.
Orchestrator Administrator - Custom: your customized version of what was the Tenant Administrator role, if you changed the base permissions of the default role in any way.

Orchestrator Administrator default role

Note: If you happen to have a custom role named Orchestrator Administrator, that role is also renamed as Orchestrator Administrator - Custom.

Permissions without effect are always cleared

Previously, the grayed-out checkboxes for permissions without effect could appear as either selected or cleared. Because these permissions have no effect, regardless of the state of the checkbox, we are now always showing their checkboxes as cleared.

Executing Long-running Workflows in the Context of Personal Workspaces

All permissions for Actions and Action Catalogs are configured as default for personal workspace administrator roles. Now, you can execute long-running workflows (orchestration processes) from your personal workspace folder.

Filtering Logs by Folder Associated Machines

In the folder context, on the Automations > Logs page, you can now filter logs by the machines associated to the current folder. Previously, the Machine filter displayed all available machines in the tenant.

Bug Fix

When the user interface language was set to a language other than English and a new tenant was created, the administrator account for the tenant did not receive administrator rights.

Orchestrator release notes

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