Recently one of my customers noticed some of their workflows were failing and had been failing for quite some time without knowing it. When looking at the failed workflow instance within System Jobs it only showed a generic error message that did not provide enough detail to troubleshoot with. You could get detailed errors by gathering a server side platform trace, but the easiest ways to get the error details is to view the message attribute within System Jobs. The message attribute will contain a stack trace of the error that the workflow or system job had encountered. Many times this attribute will provide all the detail you need for troubleshooting without having to gather any server side tracing. This attribute is not on the default System Jobs view, but it is very easy to create a personal view in Advanced Find to view this and monitor moving forward. Below are the steps on creating the personal view and viewing the message attribute.
1. Open CRM Web Client and click Advanced Find.
2. Choose System Jobs from the Look For dropdown menu.
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3. Click Show Details so we are able to add filter criteria
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4. Add the filter criteria “Message Contains Data”. This way it will only return jobs that have encountered an error. You may also add another filter on status to only show those jobs in a waiting or failed status.
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5. Click on the Edit Columns button so that we can add the message attribute to our view.
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6. Click on the Add Columns button once the edit columns window opens. Then choose the Message attribute and click OK twice to get back to the main advanced find window.
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7. Now that you have an advanced find view created for troubleshooting you can save this as a personal view. To save the view click on Save As in the toolbar, provide a name and click OK. Now this will show up in the system jobs view for future use.
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8. Click on Find within the advanced find window to see the results.
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9. Scroll to the far right to see the message column for any failed workflows. You can also export the list to Excel and that will allow you to easily format, filter and search the results.
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10. If you saved the view it will show up under the system jobs section. This will provide an easy way to watch for failing workflows and troubleshoot them without accessing the server.
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By having a system jobs view that includes the message column it will help catch failing workflows faster and provide necessary data to troubleshoot the issue.
Thanks,
Jeremy Morlock
