Troubleshooting errors and failures in a failed process instance

Using the Process Inspector, you can take corrective actions on process instance that have failed or are in an error state one at a time or in bulk across multiple locations. The best corrective action for you to take depends on the nature of the failure.

About this task

Failures can be of two types: system failures or failures that are caused by invalid or corrupted data. A process instance might fail because the network connection is down or a power failure occurs. Or it might fail because changes occur in the execution environment after the instance migrates, and those changes cause data to become invalid or corrupted.

Procedure

  1. Open the Process Inspector and filter the search to find failed process instances only. Click Search.
    You can apply other filters to scope the results to make it easier to process the failures. For example, you might want to process the failures for one process application at a time.
  2. In the results section of the Process Inspector, select a failed instance.
  3. In the details section, start by reviewing what caused the failure. Next to the status, click Error details.
  4. In the window that opens, review the error details including the Java trace.
    If you want to save the error details to a file, click Export Error.
  5. Based on what caused the failure and what information you find in the error details, take the appropriate action for the instance, its tasks, or its activities.
    For information about the impact of a particular action, see Actions in the Process Inspector.
    For example:
    • If a system going offline caused the error and the system is now running, click Retry failed steps.
    • If a task is assigned to a user who is not valid, select the task and then select Reassign to user and then assign that task to an appropriate user.
    • If the data for the instance, task, or activity is not valid, edit it to set it to an appropriate value.

    Fixing the problem might take a number of actions. For example, to skip a task, you might want to first edit its output data. Because skipping a task means that it does not update its output data, you can edit this data so that it is valid for steps that are later in the flow.

    Tip: If you suspect that a number of failed instances were caused by a common error, you can select multiple process instances to take a bulk action on all of them. For example, if you are sure that a network problem caused 50 process instances to fail, you can select those instances and then click the Retry failed steps action. If the bulk action you want to take is not available, then the action is not available in at least one of the selected instances.