2021.10.0

Context

With an ever-growing fleet of products in our arsenal, we at UiPath® are continuously exploring new ways to pave a smooth path towards automation.

We are preoccupied with your struggles and want to diminish them. We know that installing, setting up, and maintaining a large assortment of products could sometimes feel laborious, so we put some thought into it and came up with an initiative meant to reduce the complexity of these tasks.

Curious how this idea materialized? Meet Automation Suite, a framework designed to offer a consistent, painless, and elegant experience when installing, upgrading, and managing your UiPath® products.

Automation Suite in the Spotlight

The philosophy behind Automation Suite is to provide an all-encompassing solution that would minimize the effort you invest in bothersome tasks so that you can instead focus on making the most out of our tools. To put it briefly, Automation Suite bets big on a consistent and predictable experience across all UiPath® products.

But what exactly is Automation Suite, you may ask. It’s a Linux-based solution that bundles most of our server products, software dependencies, common platform components, and infrastructure in a single installer. In a nutshell, it ensures that you have the entire UiPath® suite at your fingertips.

A Sneak Peek at Automation Suite

Let’s dive into some of the goodies Automation Suite brings about.

Hyperautomation

• Automation Suite is designed to encapsulate our entire line of server products. The only exceptions are Process Mining and Data Service, which are not shipped with Automation Suite 2021.10 but are planned for a future release.
• It’s created to implement our end-to-end hyperautomation platform strategy, which should guarantee an experience similar to the one in the cloud. Just think of the benefits of Automation Cloud made available to on-premises users.
• Automation Suite provides the same set of capabilities as in the cloud for user management/directory API, as well as for tenant and license management.

Easy Installation, Upgrade, and Maintenance

• Automation Suite establishes one single delivery and maintenance mechanism for multiple UiPath® products. This approach translates into simplified installation, upgrade, and maintenance endeavors. Troubleshooting should be equally undemanding.
• It puts at your disposal the required dependencies and ensures they are installed and running. Depending on the products your business requires, each service you opt for needs to bring their manifests, configurations, and dependencies in a specific format.
• Automation Suite installers cover both online and offline (air-gapped) environments.
• Support for the installer, entire product stack and included infrastructure, and Kubernetes containerization are provided by UiPath®.
• If you are wondering how the Automation Suite initiative will impact our .MSI installers, you can rest assured that we will continue to deliver them. However, they will continue to be standalone installers per product. The .MSI installers will also play a role in the upgrade to Automation Suite. That is because, if you are an existing customer, you first need to upgrade to the latest .MSI version, and only then move to Automation Suite.

Scalability

• Automation Suite is a scalable solution that allows you to start small and then expand according to your business needs. Needless to say, it is available in both a single-node and multi-node mode, and you can start with the respective setups based on your needs. We purposefully try to be mindful of your long-term strategies, regardless of their direction and magnitude, so no worries on this front.

Known Issues and Limitations

Installation

• Root access is required at install time for setting up folder and permissions for installation.
• ODBC connection does not support usernames that contain special characters. For database usernames for AI Center and Document Understanding, use only uppercase and lowercase letters.
• Using the default value (1450) when configuring the MTU on Kubernetes Pod level could result in various issues for Azure Virtual Network. To prevent these problems, we recommend setting the Pod MTU to 1350. For more details, see Troubleshooting.

Automation Suite Portal

• The organization administrator must have an associated email address, otherwise a 400 Error occurs when trying to configure individual products.

Orchestrator

• Periodic emails with alerts are not sent to users. To ensure the SMTP Server for your Google Account is working properly, you need to set up a new outbound rule on the Network Security Group for the configured SMTP port. The settings configured for SMTP in Automation Suite should be propagated to Orchestrator in maximum 60 minutes.

AI Center

• On rare occasions, if you restart the machine two times consecutively, service deployment can get stuck because of the DATABASECHANGELOGLOCK lock not being released by one service. In this case you will see AI Center pods restarting continuously. If this happens, see the Troubleshooting section.
• Public endpoints for Datasets are not available from activity upload. The public endpoints for Datasets can still be used with HTTP calls directly.
• When using AI Center in the Automation Suite offline environment, some components are not loaded properly. This happens when opening the AI App page from a machine with no internet access.

• In a rare scenario, due to cluster state, asynchronous operations like Skill Deployment or Package upload could be stuck for a long time. If DU Skill deployment is taking more than 2-3 hours, try deploying a simpler model (e.g., TemplateModel). If the model also takes more than an hour, then the mitigation is to restart AI Center services with the following commands:

  • kubectl -n uipath rollout restart deployment ai-deployer-deployment
  • kubectl -n uipath rollout restart deployment ai-trainer-deployment
  • kubectl -n uipath rollout restart deployment ai-pkgmanager-deployment
  • kubectl -n uipath rollout restart deployment ai-helper-deployment
  • kubectl -n uipath rollout restart deployment ai-appmanager-deployment
    Wait for the AI Center pods to be back up by verifying with the following command:* `kubectl -n uipath get pods | grep ai-*` . All the above pods should be Running state with container state shown as 2/2.

Document Understanding

• When creating a Document Understanding OCR ML Package in AI Center, it cannot be named ocr or OCR. Make sure to choose another name.
• Sometimes Document Understanding is not be enabled for DefaultTenant. This manifests itself as not being able to create data labeling sessions. To fix this, disable AI Center on the tenant and re-enable it. Note that you might need to wait a few minutes before being able to re-enable it.
• Document Understanding requires the FullTextSearch feature to be enabled on the SQL server. Otherwise, the installation will fail without an explicit error message in this regard.
• The Document Understanding ML Skills prediction may not work properly, showing the prediction failed error message, if you have upgraded from the earliest release build to the latest one. Suggested workaround is to delete all keys from local storage starting with auth_token_aicenter and log in to AI Center again.
• Auto-retrain pods may remain in NotReady state after completion. Suggested workaround is to delete the NotReady pods following the command below: kubectl get pods -n uipath | grep autoretrain | grep "NotReady" | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kubectl delete pod
• After backup and restore on baremetal setup, the Training Pipeline and the Data Labeling session may get stuck on AI Center.
  • Suggested workaround for the Training Pipeline is to manually delete the ai-trainer-deployment pod in ALM and restart.
  • Suggested workaround for the Data Labeling session is to manually delete the ai-app-manager pod in ALM and restart.

Insights

• Insights does not support high availability.
• Insights looker pod fails to start after restore. You can fix this issue by deleting the Looker pod from the Insights application in ArgoCD UI. The deployment will create a new pod that should start successfully.

Test Manager

• If you were assigned a license while being logged in, your license assignment may not be detected when opening Test Manager.

If this happens, take the following steps:

1. Navigate to Test Manager.
2. Log out from the portal.
3. Log in again.

Automation Hub

• A user with an undefined e-mail address in either Automation Suite or Active Directory cannot be added to Automation Hub. If this happens, make sure the user is part of an Active Directory or Automation Suite group and add the group into Automation Hub.