Automation Suite Release Notes
2022.10.0
Release date: 25 April 2024
- Automation Hub
- Process Mining
- Test Manager
- Insights
Release date: 14 November 2022
Erratum 3 February 2023: If you are using UiPath® Apps, your CPU must have AVX support. For more information, check the Additional UiPath® Apps section from this guide.
Process Mining
Process Mining is now available in Automation Suite.
With Process Mining you can discover, automate, and monitor your end-to-end business processes. It transforms data from your IT systems into visual interactive dashboards, allowing you to identify inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and non-conformance, as well as to understand the root-causes and possible risks. Process Mining enables all levels of the organization to understand business processes and to discover process improvement opportunities, including but not limited to Automation.
See Process Mining (Automation Suite) for an overview of the main Process Mining features.
Automation Suite Robots
Automation Suite Robots have joined the party as well.
Automation Suite Robots allow you to run background unattended automation and utilize high density robots without having to worry about constantly provisioning new machines yourself to provide robot computational power at scale. Create a machine template and add it to folders to make sure that a robot and machine are always available when unattended processes in that folder need to run.
See Automation Suite robots for more information on how to set up and use this feature.
We have added a new self-service option that lets you try out new services and capabilities on your existing deployments and data.
If you don't already own them, you can now start a free trial for:
Organization administrators can request and enable a service trial from the organization-level Licenses page, on the new Trial Services tab:
For detailed instructions, see Requesting a service trial.
Until now, the default Automation Suite installation experience has included a choice of two product selections, each with its own set of hardware requirements: Complete and Basic.
We have deprecated the Basic product selection, and we are offering a-la-carte product selection instead so that you can pick only the products you are interested in. As a result, even Orchestrator is now an optional product.
While this change increases your flexibility, it also comes with some rules, but you’ll see these are for your own benefit. The Automation Suite interactive installer now ensures that cross-product dependencies are resolved and that your UiPath® ecosystem works without any hiccups.
As expected, this new option has introduced a series of changes in the behavior of the Automation Suite interactive installer. For details, check out Manual: Single-node evaluation profile requirements and installation and Manual: Multi-node HA-ready production profile requirements and installation.
This release improves the way in which AI Center works within the Automation Suite environment.
- You can convert your AI Center standalone installation to a standard Automation Suite one in order to benefit from the platform capabilities to host additional products.
- You can connect your AI Center running in Automation Suite 2022.10 to a standalone Orchestrator and Identity the same way AI Center standalone installation worked in previous versions.
We have updated the list of prerequisites for the Automation Suite installation.
Before starting a manual installation, you must now ensure that you have a RHEL subscription, that you have enabled the suitable repositories, and that you have installed all the required RPM packages.
install-uipath.sh manual installer to install and validate RPM packages.
For a complete list of required RPM packages and details on the tools you can use to validate your environment, see Hardware and software requirements.
Escape the need to manually enter your domain credentials every time you want to access ArgoCD. Configure the single sign-on authentication method for your users, and allow them to simply click for a more secure access. Learn how to Enable SSO for ArgoCD.
We have introduced a new tool guiding you through the steps you need to take to complete the Automation Suite installation as well as common post-installation operations. It is called Cluster Administration, and it sports an approachable UI that provides useful instructions on handling tasks such as certificate configuration, Kerberos authentication setup, node administration, database maintenance, cluster monitoring, and many more.
To put it briefly, Cluster Administration centralizes a multitude of tools you may need after completing an Automation Suite installation. Just click the output URL the interactive installer or the cloud templates provide you with at the end of the installation process, and explore your options.
For more details on the operations the Cluster Administration offers support for, see Getting started with the Cluster Administration portal.
If it's the prospect of complexity that keeps you from installing Automation Suite, you have fewer reasons to worry now as we bring the Deployment Assistant to your aid.
The Deployment Assistant provides step-by-step instructions on how to get your environment ready, which requirements you must meet, and which documentation you should read to make sure you do not miss anything.
The wizard asks you a series of questions about the configuration you target, then gives relevant guidance on how to build a deployment that caters to your needs.
The Deployment Assistant currently covers only the single-node evaluation profile of Automation Suite.
For more details, see Getting started with the Deployment Assistant.
Erratum: We removed the preview multi-site deployment documentation from version 2022.10 of the Automation Suite Installation Guide because the functionality reached General Availability in version 2023.4. For details, see Disaster recovery - Active/Passive.
The good news does not stop here: we are introducing multi-site deployments.
What this means is that Automation Suite can withstand the complete failure of nodes, entire data centers, or even regions, and supports the following deployment topologies:
- Active-Active – Both clusters deployed in active mode;
- Active-Passive – One cluster is active whereas the other is deployed in standby mode.
Note, however, that this feature is in preview stage, and for the time being, only Orchestrator and part of AI Center are available in multi-site deployment.
Administrators, we have big news for you: The Administration pages have been redone in a new style!
Left rail is out, App launcher is in
While on the Administration pages, there is no more left rail - the bar at the left of the window from where you could move between services. This change will make sense as you keep reading.
Now, to switch to a different service, you do so by clicking the existing App launcher icon in the top left corner.
Host, organizations, and tenants
Functionally, the main things we have changed are to clarify the context shift between host-level, organization-level, and tenant-level settings.
In the new admin experience, the left hand side, which we typically use for navigation options, now shows your context options, which are as follows:
-
In the host portal:
- The host at the top of the panel, which lets you access host-level settings.
- Your existing organizations, which let you access options for each organization, are listed below the host.
-
In the organization-level portal:
- The organization name at the top of the panel, which lets you access organization-level settings.
- Your existing tenants, which let you access options for each tenant, are listed below the organization.
With this change, you select an item on the left - organization or tenant - to see the settings for it in the main page area:
Where are my settings?
Not to worry. We have left all other functionality as you know it. It might live in a different place, but we assure you, it's all still there and your settings are unchanged.
But all you need to remember is this:
When on the Admin pages, the first thing to do is to select the entity for which you want to update settings. Then you can easily find all the settings you expect.
Licensing new tenants
As part of this overhaul, we also included a helpful tweak.
Before, when you created a new tenant, all your available licenses were automatically allocated to that tenant. If you didn't want that, you had to follow-up tenant creation with adjusting the tenant's licenses.
Now, as part of tenant creation (which is now a wizard-style guided process, by the way), on the final step, we let you see and adjust the number of licenses to allocate to the tenant as part of setup.
Change is hard
That's why we have included an option that lets you switch back to the old admin experience.
We understand you might have gotten attached to the old interface and might need to switch back because don't have time to figure out the new interface.
But you should know that this option is only available for a limited time. In the future, we plan to remove the old experience completely.
We have also improved the user interface in the Security Settings pages of the administration portals. Again, functionally, the existing features remain the same. But what we changed is the wording we used around integrated third-party directories. These changes are meant to:
- distinguish between authentication settings that are used with local accounts (native to UiPath®) and the ones that are used with directory accounts (originating from a third-party directory);
- clarify the impact of configuring a third-party directory integration at host level, in which case it is only enabling SSO for all users, as opposed to configuring it at organization level, in which case the integration allows for extended capabilities such as directory search from within UiPath® and auto-provisioning of accounts.
External object storage
We have decoupled Objectstore from the cluster nodes in favor of external storage. This translates into the possibility of choosing Azure, AWS, or S3-compatible providers to handle your storage externally.
Opting for external object storage is not mandatory, but it does bring multiple benefits to the table. First of all, this configuration ensures resilience to data loss when a node and the underlying storage crash or are corrupted. Aside from that, you can perform data replication and disaster recovery independently of Automation Suite.
As for how and when you can configure external object storage, here are your options:
- During installation, using the
installUiPathAS.shinstaller. For details, see the installation instructions for the single-node evaluation profile and the multi-node HA-ready production profile. - Post-installation, using the
cluster_config.jsonconfiguration file. For details, see External object storage configuration.
Ceph on raw devices
We have moved the Objectstore outside the block storage and directly attached it to the nodes' disk. We have decided to implement this change so that we can reduce the replication factor for storage from 18x to 3x. While previously you needed 18 GiB of data disk to store 1 GiB of data, you now need only 3 GiB of disks. To find out more about this, check out the Hardware and software requirements and Evaluating your storage needs.
Another notable advantage of this approach is that you can scale your storage just by adding new disks without increasing the number of server nodes or changing any other configuration.
We have optimized the per-node requirements for minimum processor and RAM . You now need 8 (v-)CPU/cores and 16 GiB of RAM per node to install Automation Suite in multi-node HA-ready production mode. For more details, see Hardware and software requirements.
We have simplified the backup and restore strategy so that you can use a single command. Capture the snapshot at any point in time using the on-demand snapshot command, or set up a schedule to do it for you by just providing the desired frequency. Define the retention policy for any snapshot and create multiple restoration points for your cluster.
Backing up your cluster configuration protects you from unwanted data failure, as you can always restore to the latest snapshot.
Erratum: August 10, 2023
We have also changed the NFS disk requirements from 4 TiB SSD to 2 TiB SSD.
We want you to have quick and easy access to our latest bug fixes and improvements, so we've improved the upgrade experience. Whenever possible, you can move from a 2022.10.x minor version to another without worrying about downtime. Generally, Cumulative Updates (CUs) no longer require upgrading the entire infrastructure and the shared suite platform layer. As a result, Automation Suite CUs are less disruptive, and getting the latest bug fixes and improvements is easier than ever.
docker-registry and containerd with container images for the new product version before the upgrade. For instructions, see Automated: Offline upgrade and Manual: Offline upgrade.
When configuring the SAML integration for your organization, we now also support the HTTP POST option for the SAML binding type setting.
Depending on how you set up the identity provider, you can now select HTTP redirect to use URL parameters, or HTTP POST to use an HTML form with base64-encoded content instead.
The Automation Suite internal components have received major updates to improve your overall experience with the platform. RKE2 and Rancher are the stars of the event, but many other internal components have seen considerable enhancements as well. For details, check out the Internal component version section.
cluster_config.json parameter: fault_tolerance. For instructions, see Advanced installation experience.
.pfx format to the --cert-file-path flag and a password to the --password flag in the configureUiPathAS.sh script.
.pem format to --cert-file-path and specify the certificate private key using the --cert-key-file-path flag.
For details, see Managing identity token signing certificate.
We have improved the Automation Suite Install Sizing Calculator so that you can easily check how much hardware you need to deploy any Automation Suite setup. The tool now covers the newly onboarded products, and factors in all updated hardware requirements. If you want to migrate to external objectstore, you will find the tool useful. The same goes for performing backup and restore operations, changing the node fault tolerance configuration, or configuring a multi-site deployment.
If you want to take the calculator for a spin, see Capacity planning documentation.
We have made changes to all our scripts not only so that they reflect the new functionality introduced by this Automation Suite release, but also to fix some bugs.
We continue to provide security updates and patches to address Common Vulnerability and Exposures (CVE).
In addition to that, we have enhanced security hardening of container images used in UiPath® products by standardizing and reducing the surface area of base container images up to ~90% in some cases. This helps in reducing the overall volume of CVEs in product images.
Last but not least, all container images are now digitally signed with a UiPath-owned key. This adds an additional layer of security to ensure the integrity of product artifacts in production registry.
- We have improved the cluster uninstall operation, with the dedicated script performing raw device cleanup. For details, see Uninstalling the cluster.
- The IP address of sources generating traffic is now logged by Istio, whereas previously it was masked by the IP address of the load balancer.
- External apps can now authenticate using the client credentials flow.
-
Erratum - added May 20, 2024: Previously, on single-node deployments with in-cluster storage, upgrades from version 2022.4.1 or older would fail at the fabric stage. A
rook-cephmigration issue was causing the failure. The behavior no longer occurs. - When users who did not have the organization administrator role navigated to the Management portal URL, they were navigated
to an administrator-only page (
https://<server>/identity/management/users) and saw a message stating that the URL does not exist, which was confusing. Now, the messageThis URL is only available to adminsis displayed when they navigate to an admin-only page, and they are navigated to a non-administrator page. - You could not delete or modify users unless you were a member of the Administrators group.
- We have made some changes to the
configureUiPathAS.shscript to fix an issue causing certificate rotation to fail when a wildcard domain name (*) was not provided as a Subject Alternative Name (SAN). - When the TLS certificate expired, the Diagnostics tool was showing a warning instead of throwing an error.
- The
installUiPathAS.shinteractive installer did not check if the required ports were already in use before starting the installation.
-
Erratum - added October 17, 2024: In a proxy environment, if the proxy server uses the same port as the TCP port of any other service in the Istio service mesh, such as port 8080, pods cannot communicate with the FQDN. The issue causes the following error:
System.Net.Http.HttpRequestException: The proxy tunnel request to proxy 'http://<proxyFQDN>:8080/' failed with status code '404'.System.Net.Http.HttpRequestException: The proxy tunnel request to proxy 'http://<proxyFQDN>:8080/' failed with status code '404'.To fix the issue, see the Troubleshooting section.
-
Erratum - added August 29, 2024: We have identified certain vulnerabilities associated with the usage of weak ciphers in TLS 1.2. For details on how to mitigate the issue, see How to address weak ciphers in TLS 1.2.
-
Erattum - added April 19, 2024: Alert configurations (email and webhook receivers) get lost on reboot of machine or re-sync of
alertmanager-configsecret. For details, refer to -
Erattum - added April 19, 2024: In certain situations, Ceph metrics and alerts are missing from the monitoring dashboards. To fix the issue, see the Troubleshooting section.
-
Erattum - added April 19, 2024: False positive CephMgrIsAbsent alerts are displayed even though there are no storage issues.
-
Erratum - added April 19, 2024: In certain situations, Prometheus pods can fail to start due to an out-of-memory (OOM) error. To fix the issue, see the Troubleshooting section.
-
Erratum - added February 28, 2024: Stored procedures do not support collation differences between the SQL server and SQL database. To avoid any potential problems, you must ensure that the collation settings of both SQL server and SQL database are identical.
-
Erratum - added January 2024: The replica cleanup script incorrectly reclaims storage on the nodes. For more details, see the Storage reclamation patch troubleshooting article.
- Erratum - added November 18, 2022: Trying to remove a node would fail in any of the following scenarios:
- If you enabled external storage;
- If Process Mining (AirFlow) and/or Automation Suite Robots service pods are scheduled on the node.
- An Azure known issue incorrectly marks the Azure disk as non-SSD. If Azure is your cloud provider, and you want to configure the Ceph OSD disk, we have a workaround for you. Just follow the instructions in Troubleshooting.
- Disabling or changing the AD integration settings does not update the underlying directory connections properly. As a workaround,
delete the SQL
DirectoryConnectionsandExternalIdentityProviderstable entries, then restart the Identity pods. - If you enable only Process Mining via the
installUiPathAS.shinteractive installer, you must exit just before the installation step, and modify thecluster_config.jsonfile generated at the/opt/UiPathAutomationSuite/cluster_config.jsonlocation by adding the following configuration:platform.enabled="true".
We recommend that you regularly check the deprecation timeline for any updates regarding features that will be deprecated and removed.
To find out what has changed on each Automation Suite product, visit the following links.
If the product is greyed out, this new Automation Suite version does not bring any changes to it.
This Automation Suite release bundles the following internal components:
|
Component |
Version |
|---|---|
|
RKE2 |
v1.22.12+rke2r1 |
|
ArgoCD |
v2.2.12 |
|
rook-ceph |
v1.8.9 |
|
cert-manager |
1.9.1 |
|
rancher |
2.6.7 |
|
rancher-istio |
100.4.0-up1.14.1 |
|
longhorn |
1.3.1 |
|
longhorn-crd |
1.1.100 |
|
reloader |
v0.0.89 |
|
csi-driver-smb |
v1.8.0 |
|
rabbitmq-operator |
1.5.0 |
|
redis-operator |
v6.2.10-45 |
|
redis-cluster |
v6.2.10-129 |
|
mongodb |
5.0.7-ent |
|
docker_registry |
2.7.1 |
The migration tool version you need depends on the standalone products you plan to migrate and the targeted Automation Suite version. For more details, see Migration compatibility matrix.
For instructions on migrating a standalone product to the current version of Automation Suite, see Full migration.
- Changes to license-related tenant limitations
- What’s New
- New Products and Services
- Service Trials
- A-la-carte Product Selection
- AI Center and Automation Suite Interoperability
- RPM Packages
- ArgoCD SSO Authentication
- Unified UI Experience
- New Deployment Assistant
- Preview: Multi-site Deployments
- Improvements
- New Admin Experience
- Security Settings Interface Changes
- Storage Improvements
- Optimized Hardware Requirements
- Improved Backup and Restore
- Zero Downtime Cumulative Updates
- Optimized Upgrades
- SAML POST Binding
- Major Platform Updates
- Increased Server Node Fault Tolerance
- Certificate Improvements
- Improved Capacity Calculator
- Script Improvements
- Security Improvements
- Miscellaneous
- Bug Fixes
- Known Issues
- Deprecation timeline
- Bundling details
- Product Versions
- Internal Third-party Component Versions
- Migration tool version
