Self Service Process Unarchive (SSPU)

Overview

The Self Service Process Unarchive (SSPU) is an Appian plug-in and application that enables users to unarchive a subset of processes from within the Appian environment. This will be useful for most Appian Cloud customers as they do not have direct access to the server backend to either directly search for archived processes or to unarchive processes using a script.

Preconditions:

• The Appian environment is on version 20.2 or higher.
• The process(es) that will be unarchived has been logged to one of the removed_processes_db_PX*.csv logs.
• The archived process(es) have not been automatically compressed or deleted on the filesystem.
• The processes in the application must be started as a System Administrator for them to function as expected.

What the application will NOT do:

• Support environments that are not single server or 3 node HA
• Support the use of databases other than MySQL and MariaDB

== SSPU Application features ==

• Ability to unarchive processes using information from the removed_processes_db_PX*.csv logs.
• Supports parsing the logs on environments with multiple application servers.
• Schedule when inserts to database, unarchives and archives are performed.
• Archived Processes report to view archived processes currently in the Archived Processes table that is used in the application.
• Process model ID to process model names mapping report for easy reference of process model names in the past.
• After unarchiving processes, a task is created to rearchive processes so user doesn't forget to archive them to minimise memory usage.
• Unarchive summary provides a support case template in the event it is detected that there are compressed or deleted processes that Support will have to manually verify/unarchive.

Key Features and Functionality

== SSPU Plug-in features ==

• Insert Archived Processes To DB smart service
  • Parses the removed_processes_* logs on the server and inserts information about archived processes into a database table in batches to avoid a situation where disk increases too rapidly.
  • Accounts for HA environments to parse the logs in other nodes hosting an application server.
  • Uses a database table to keep track of removed_processes_* logs already parsed to minimise duplicate database inserts.
• Unarchive Processes smart service
  • Unarchives archived processes that have not been compressed or deleted.
  • Outputs results of unarchive into different buckets depending on whether specific archived processes were unarchived or not.
    • unarchived
    • non existent
    • compressed or deleted
    • already unarchived
• Archive Processes smart service
  • Archive processes that are completed in the environment.
  • Performed using the batch API call for improved speed.
  • Detects whether process was successfully archived or not.