The infrastructure team has some upgrade or patch activity every month. The team informs us about it. Usually, it happens only on weekends. Maintenance takes three hours monthly.

The time to maintain bots varies depending on their purpose but typically ranges from one to four days on average.

Daily, we perform routine bot maintenance for a few minutes, unless a significant problem arises.

We don't need to constantly monitor the bot as it runs according to its schedule. It performs its tasks autonomously, but manual intervention is necessary in certain situations. For example, if an expected input file fails to arrive at the scheduled time, the automation process will stop. In such cases, a support engineer must contact the business to address the missing file. Additionally, manual intervention might be required for downstream automation tasks, such as when a front-end UI changes on an application. These situations depend on the specific downstream application, business needs, and other factors.

The maintenance requirements for Automation Anywhere vary depending on the situation. Minor issues can be quickly identified and reported to Automation Anywhere, who will respond within 24-48 hours based on the purchased services. Our system administrator can resolve minor issues. Audits may be conducted in a development environment, where estimates for time and effort can be determined. Cost and time estimates are not fixed and depend on the specific issue.

Bots running on a cloud platform require continuous maintenance. While the cloud platform can monitor the bots, human oversight is essential to identify and troubleshoot issues like crashes. Large clients may necessitate a dedicated maintenance team working shifts to provide 24/7 monitoring and support. These teams typically monitor the bots' control room on a separate screen while performing other tasks. In the event of a crash, they investigate the cause and, if unable to resolve it, escalate the issue to the development team for further assistance.

Once we develop the bot, we hand it to the support team.

The bots require maintenance on our end to ensure smooth operation. This includes monitoring their uptime, examining audit trails for failures, and periodically checking their performance. While Automation Anywhere handles regular software updates and maintenance, we are responsible for maintaining the business processes the bots support. This involves ongoing support and ensuring the bots function correctly. If a bot fails, we are responsible for investigating the cause and restoring it to functionality, as we understand the critical role each bot plays in our operations.

Weekly maintenance of the bots, including any necessary manual tasks, requires one to two hours.

It also depends on the configuration and the number of automations. My largest client has 400 automations in production, so it's a full-time job. They say one person can manage that many, but I don't think that's a healthy number. It's more like 140, depending on the SLAs and use cases.

The time spent on bot maintenance varies based on the complexity of the tasks. Simple cloud server or production changes require minimal time, approximately two to three hours. Application changes are more involved, with L3 or L2 tickets potentially taking three to four days depending on the service level agreement and impact. Minor L1 tickets, such as troubleshooting malfunctioning ML or server downtime, can involve either small or large changes. Migrating environments, like transitioning from on-premise to cloud, constitutes a major change that can take a month or even a couple of months.

The automation team handles bot maintenance directly, eliminating the need for a separate maintenance team.

There is some maintenance needed on the bots. That's not the software's fault. The maintenance effort is quite low compared to what I was used to.

The main challenge that we are trying to solve with agentive process automation is business rules. We have many bots that have complex business rules, and these business rules are usually hard coded.

The stability and reliability of Automation Anywhere's bots depend significantly on how we define our development strategies. If we have good practices, reusable code, a solid framework, and effective development methodologies, the bots can be very stable.

The time required for maintenance varies. Some automations are very stable, while others may not be due to issues with the developer’s execution or the quality of the target application. It's not Automation Anywhere's fault, but the platform itself isn't very adept at performing self-maintenance.

I spend about half a day to a day on maintaining bots in Automation Anywhere.

Regarding bot maintenance, if there are no changes in the web application or desktop application and no machine issues, bots can run for three to four years without human intervention.

Automation Anywhere is not difficult to upgrade because we have bot scripts. When we upgrade, the bot scripts remain unchanged, so there is no difficulty.

I could implement it all by myself without any consultancy or help from outside.