Troubleshooting Robotmk Client side

Owned by Matthew Hierholzer
yesterday at 3:28 pm

 This article gives you an overview about different problems which can arise on a Windows based Robotmk Client. 

LAST TESTED ON CHECKMK 2.3.0P1


Table of Contents


Environment building timed out


Problem

The Robotmk Scheduler Service is CRITICAL and shows "Suite Scheduling, Plan 'PLAN_NAME': Environment building timed out. Suite won't be executed."

Solution

Check the setting Environment build timeout in the Robotmk Scheduler bakery rule.

It is set to 10 minutes by default and this should normally be enough time to build an environment for Robot framework and the Browser library (including the three browser binaries). Only increase if there is a good reason. 

Also check the test machine requirements: 4 vCPUs are the lowest number of CPUs recommended. With 2 CPUs, RCC takes ages to create an environment. 

The machine's RAM resources get exhausted

(Robotmkv2 scheduler executes headless web tests on a Windows VM. )

Problem

After some time (a few hours to 1.5 days) the memory of the test client is used up. The tests fail due to timeouts, the machine hardly responds at all. 
The problem can only be solved by a reboot. 

Background

Threat Protection mechanisms of antivirus program do not cope well with the many Browser/Chrome tasks that are constantly coming and going. 

Individual scans are not completed because the task is no longer available, but the RAM blocked for it is not released again.

Solution (MS Defender)

These PS commands will add exceptions to the scanning rules of MS Defender: 


Checkmk 2.3
Add-MpPreference -ExclusionProcess "C:\ProgramData\checkmk\agent\*" 
Add-MpPreference -ExclusionProcess "C:\ProgramData\robocorp\ht\*" 
Add-MpPreference -ExclusionPath "C:\ProgramData\checkmk\agent\*" 
Add-MpPreference -ExclusionPath "C:\ProgramData\robocorp\ht\*"


Checkmk 2.4
Add-MpPreference -ExclusionProcess "C:\robotmk\*" 
Add-MpPreference -ExclusionPath "C:\robotmk\*"