ILINX® Robotic Process Automation (RPA) allows automated ILINX robots called “agents” to interact with one or more desktop applications to perform pre-configured tasks such as authenticating into applications, searching and locating information, modifying records, extracting and delivering information between the programs as needed. RPA is a low-code/no-code, non-invasive technology that provides reliable automated data processing which increases accuracy and consistency while freeing up key resources to work on higher-value tasks.

ILINX RPA leverages the ILINX Integrate product to perform the application linking and integrations which are executed on each of the RPA Agent machines. The ILINX RPA Agents manage the local execution of the specified ILINX Integrate task and report the results back to the ILINX RPA orchestrator.

ILINX Integrate configurations can perform operations such as:

• Log into any application
• Connect to system APIs
• Copy and paste data between application screens
• Move files and folders
• Read/write to databases
• Scrape data from the web
• Perform calculations

Agents are installed using the ILINX RPA Agent installation executable and are required for each “bot” in the RPA environment. The ILINX RPA Agent is a Windows Service (appears as “ILINX RPA Agent” in the Windows Services admin tool) that connects back to the central ILINX RPA server to receive new tasks, initiate associated local ILINX Integrate processes, and report on the status of completed tasks. This ILINX RPA server URL and other configuration settings such as input, output, and error folders are found in the “ILINXRPAAgent.exe.config” file in the ILINX RPA installation folder.

The RPA Agent Admin console is available in the Capture Admin tab.  This interface allows admin users to monitor and control all ILINX RPA Agents connected to the system.

The RPA tab lists all connected RPA Agents and displays key operational information including the host name and IP address of the machine on which the Agent is running, the date on which the agent was created, the Agent’s current status, and any relevant error information.

The Status column displays the current state of the Agent. Values can be one of the following:

• Idle: Agent is available to work a job
• Running: Agent has accepted a job and is presumably working it
• Stopping: pause command sent but Agent is still processing previous job
• Stopped: admin has manually paused the Agent which will not be assigned jobs. Agent has completed previous job and acknowledged it is paused.
• StoppedWithErrors: Agent has encountered a catastrophic error and cannot continue without manual intervention. See the “Error message” column for details.

Buttons at the bottom of the panel allow the admin to control the execution of RPA Agents as needed. To work with an Agent, highlight the row and then use the Resume, Pause or Properties buttons.

• Resume – Use this button to resume an agent that has been paused
• Pause – Use this button to pause an agent.
• Properties – This button displays properties of the selected Agent including the last date/time the status was updated, number of successful jobs processed, and number of failed jobs. A detailed log of all RPA Agent activities can be found in the RPAAgentLog table in the ILINX database.