This recipe contains a lot of small little bits and pieces around the Orchestrator Control Center.
This is a collection of little bits and pieces...
This enables you to check what workflows are running, to cancel running workflows and to inspect them:
- In the Orchestrator Control Center, go to Inspect Workflow.
- You now see all the currently running workflows. You can use the example workflow
06.04.01 Sleepfor testing. - To cancel the workflow, tick it and then select Cancel all selected.
- Click on Refresh Grid to show the changes.
- Click on Finished Workflows.
- You can now select for either failed, completed, and/or canceled workflows.
- You can also narrow down the timeframe of the search.
- As well as search by the Workflow name, its Workflow ID, or its Token ID.
- By clicking on one of the blue links, you can get additional information of the workflow, such as its logs and schema.
You can configure several system properties that will change the way Orchestrator behaves:
- In the Orchestrator Control Center, go to System Properties.
- Click on the plus sign.
- Enter the Key you would like to change as well as the Value it should now have. A Description helps quite a lot at this stage.
- Click on Add and then restart the Orchestrator service.
In the How it works... section is a list of common system properties to set.
You can change the login name for the Control Center in order to increase security:
- In the Orchestrator Control Center, click on Settings (top right).
- Click on the Change Credentials.
- Enter the Old password.
- Now enter a New user name for the Control Center user. The default is
root. - Enter the New password and click on Change Credentials:
The Control Center also includes a file browser, which is also able to download you some files:
- In the Orchestrator Control Center, go to File System Browser.
- You are presented with four different folders that you can access (see the following screenshot).
- Click on one of the folders to see its content.
- Select the blue icon on the right of the file to download it:
The Control Center has quite a lot of features and turns out to be much more interesting than the old Configurator. The ability to use a REST interface pushes automated configurations and deployments further and further. One could create in Orchestrator a workflow that deploys two Orchestrators, and then by using the Control Center API, configure them as clusters.
The Control Center comes with its own REST API. This allows you to configure Orchestrator via REST and so automate the configuration. The whole thing comes with a bit of documentation to have a look at:
https://[Orchestror FQDN]:8283/vco-controlcenter/docs
We will have a much closer look at it in the recipe Accessing the Control Center via REST plugin in Chapter 7, Interacting with Orchestrator.
Here we have a selection of system properties:
|
Property |
Value |
Description |
|
|
true |
Allows orchestrator to execute commands on the appliance OS. |
|
|
true |
Disables any non-admin access to the Orchestrator Client. |
|
|
[file location] |
Integrates new Java classes in Orchestrator. |
|
|
[ms] |
vCenter time out. Default 20,000 ms. |
The advanced options let you re-define some of the limitations of Orchestrator. In the Orchestrator Control Center, go to Advanced Options.
|
Advanced Options |
Usage |
|
Enable safe mode |
This option cancels all running workflows without restarting them after an Orchestrator restart. |
|
Number of concurrent running workflows |
The number of workflows that run at the same time. |
|
Maximum amount of running workflows in the queue |
Defines the length of the workflow queue. Workflow requests are stored in the queue until they are run. If the queue is full, no new workflows can be run. |
|
Maximum number of preserved runs per workflow |
How many workflow executions should be kept before the oldest get deleted? |
|
Log events expiration days |
The number of days log events are kept in the database before being purged. |
Before changing these settings to higher values, consider scaling out your Orchestrator deployment, see the Introduction to Chapter 3, Distributed Design.
The recipe Accessing the Control Center via REST plugin in Chapter 7, Interacting with Orchestrator.