Playback duration

During playback, it was often difficult to understand how fast the playback was going compared to the recording. Extensive work has been done in for the playback operator to understand what is happening in the playback and how it compares to what happened in the recording.

Duration added to the “Current Blocks” grid

In the “Currently Executing Blocks” grid in the monitoring section of the playback, it is possible to see both the recording duration and the playback duration of the currently executing blocks. Since a block may have more than 1 step, then it is important to clarify what is being computed here.

In the case of a single step (e.g. a batch job, RFC, web-service), this is the recording time will show the server time during the recording of the execution of that step. In the case of a multi-step script (such as a SAP GUI dialog transaction), then the recording time of all steps are added up.

However, with the playback duration (due to the nature of the calculation), the steps are accumulated in the same manner, but the network latency during the call to the bot plus whatever network latency there is between the bot and the playback system, is also included. Hence the two durations cannot be directly compared for this reason.

The value in showing the recording duration here is to give the playback operator an understanding of the approximate time that a block should take. This is extremely useful for batch jobs and in particular, long running batch jobs.

Playback duration in execution queue blocks

*As can be seen in the screenshot above, both the recording and playback durations are clearly visible in the grid for the operator to make informed decisions upon.

Duration added to the “Recently Executed Steps” grid

Both the recording duration and the playback duration are now also visible within the “recently executed steps” grid, visible in the lower left of the monitoring screen. This is after the step has been executed, rather than during the step execution.

Playback duration in recently executed steps

As can be seen in the screenshot above, the recently executed steps now clearly shows how long the server response time was for the given step in the recording compared to the during the playback (which also includes network latency).