Debug Information when a job failed

[lcury]

A feature request that would be tremendously helpful is if Workato would have the Debug logs (raw API requests/responses) available right away when a job is failed. Only adding that information when a job is repeated is just not practical at all when troubleshooting issues and I'll give 2 real life examples where it can be a real pain...

• Lately we've been experiencing sporadic failures with Workato out of the box connector for Salesforce where it would only show the error "Timed out connecting to server". But we know it was not a real timeout proble, because workato has 3 minutes default timeout but the API call failed right away (you could figure this out by the job start time and the job duration). It seems more of a "503 Service Unavailable" where the request is rejected right away, but there's no telling. And in these cases, repeating the job would simply work and we would never have access to the raw logs for the API requests/responses. When working with a partner like Salesforce Support, they can only do so much to troubleshoot on their end if we can't share the raw logs.
• On a more generic note where you're trying to troubleshoot an action (API call) failure but even though the problem would persist, there are times we can't simply repeat the job with the failure on a chain of jobs. When we design more complex integration scenarios, we make use of the Function Recipes and you would have like the parent job that's your trigger then a function recipe call (the first child job) that would act like a dispatch layer, which could potencially call another function (the second child job in the chain) that would eventually call one or multiple actions (third job in the chain). In such design patterns, it's not realistic or safe to rerun just a child job because Workato wouldn't continue running everything up the chain from the failure point. Instead it runs from the first step of that child job and ends right there. This can become a potential problem and cause data loss or inconsistencies. Then you'd think, oh, I can just rerun the parent job from scratch, as it's the right way to do it, right? Correct, but all the chain of children jobs will be new jobs and therefore won't log the actual debug information in it again, only in case these child jobs are individually repeated!

I don't know if other customers experience similar struggle and frustration, but please echo here in case you do in case you see this change bringing real benefits to you and your team as well.

[deven-maru]

Lucas Cury The time-based collection of debug data (last hour etc.) has costs associated with it. The % jobs failed helps us understand the extent of the costs that may be incurred in any solution. Yes, please go ahead and raise a ticket for the enhancement. Thanks!

[yaro]

Not sure if u have been experiencing this one since posting, but I’ve been dealing with the same issue  for a looong time now, pointed it out to Workato team multiple times but nothing much changed for now.

The suggestion I have works for apps that are going through the on-prem agent. For this one I believe you can set up agent log level to something like “Trace” (check documentation for exact value if needed). That will collect  much more data regarding all requests/response which, consequently, you can use to debug the issue when this happens again or populate collected data with Workato team  (note that it fills memory up pretty quick,  so don’t forget to keep an eye on it if you don’t have lots of memory for logging on a machine running the agent).

In case u use pre-built connector with some standard populated auth - I believe there is no legit and  convenient way to debug such an issue, Workato sometimes shows “timeout” mentioned by you or “internal error” ) thus, consider using error handling to repeat step if failed. As you mentioned, it would work if u call for the second time, so your data flow would not be affected, also u can add logging/errorNotification and contact Workato team. If that issue happens less than a month ago - they can help to figure out the root of the problem + will try to help you fix it  in case this is not an issue on their side but on customer’s. 

Feel free just to skip this reply if u know all of this😅