Control Room Overview

Objective: Following along a tutorial to build a bot is one thing – but its important as a new bot developer to understand the Control Room, understand how the development interface is laid out, and understand the flow that bots typically follow from ideation to public check in and deployment.

The Control Room is the central interface for all things bot management, global value creation, user management, deployment and testing. All that said, dependent on your role within the organization – you may or may not see all of those capabilities from the A2019 Control Room interface. While most of your time as a bot builder will be spent in the Bot Editor interface, its important to recognize what else can be done from the Control Room itself. Taking a look at the tabs you most likely have access to as a developer (again, if you don’t see all of these tabs in your interface, it’ts ok – thats controlled through your role…its most important just to understand whats possible from this interface as this point) :

1. Activity: From the activity tab users can see in progress bot runs, set-up and modify schedules for unattended bot runs, view event trigger details for bots that execute from a trigger, as well as view historical details on bots that have previously executed. Should you be executing unattended bot runner tests or reviewing production deployments – this will be the tab where you spend quite a bit of time.

2. Bots: From the bots tab (where bot builders spend a majority of their time) – we can access our private bot repository as well as view bots and bot components that have been checked in to the public bot repository. Additionally, users have the capability to manage credentials (values that are securely stored in the Control Room for use by bots), manage global values (environment specific values which are accessible to all bots), as well as the packages section where developers have the ability to manage and install custom packages.

3. Devices: The Devices tab is where users come to set up devices which can be made available during development, testing, and production bot execution. It’s on this tab that users can add or remove devices, upgrade devices, and validate that the Bot Agent on a particular device is able to successfully connect to the Control Room.

4. Workload: Workload management in A2019 provides users with the capability of managing bot workload by dividing work into logical segments which can be processed simultaneously across bot runners. The Workload tab of the Control Room allows administrators and developers to setup, manage, and modify workload queues that have been set up for groups of bot runners – including adding and removing devices to different workload pools.

5. Bot Store: The Bot Store tab allows users to directly install free or paid content from the Automation Anywhere Bot Store directly into their Control Room. With this capability, pre-developed bots and custom packages that are acquired via Bot Store can be instantly installed and used in your own environment to accelerate the bot building process.

Let’s dive a bit deeper into a few of these topics by reviewing some of the following materials:

In order to successfully build, test, and manage bots – its important to understand the tool you’re using, its capabilities, and its features. As you creatively approach automation opportunities within your organization, be thinking back to the capabilities of Automation Anywhere A2019 and how you might leverage different bot capabilities and different product features to automate everything from simple tasks that need to run once a week to complex automations that leverage Bot Store custom packages and Workload management capabilities.