Documentation
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INDEX

Documentation Library

Search for information on Hornbill Documentation.

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Have questions about this site?

What is this site?

  • This website is Hornbill's new product documentation website and is currently under development.
  • It is intended that all existing and future public-facing documentation we produce will be available to search, browse and share.
  • Hornbill's current documentation is available at Hornbill Wiki but over time this content will be migrated to this documentation site.
  • Please feel free to have a look around at any time.

Why has Hornbill created this site?

  • Hornbill's products have moved on considerably since we introduced it almost 10 years ago. At the time, the MediaWiki tool was sufficient, but we have outgrown it.
  • Our customers are more enterprise focused and more self-sufficient than ever before, so for 2023 and beyond we have established a new documentation platform and team to drive our documentation initiative forwards.
  • We are aiming to deprecate the use of Hornbill Wiki for most Hornbill related documentation.
  • We want to enable our growing partner network with product resources and information, documentation beyond our Wiki approach is required.
  • We could definitely do with some help, and may even pay for some! If you have domain knowledge and would like to help, please check out our Hornbill Docs Contributor Guide and contact the Hornbill docs team at docs@hornbill.com.

What will this site be good for?

  • Community contribution will be facilitated, encouraged, and most welcome.
  • High quality documentation, will be kept up to date as rapidly as our products evolve.
  • Real-time content search and discovery.
  • Articles organized into books, books into libraries, creating a more natural and logical structure to our documentation.
  • Legacy API documentation and various other documentation sources will all be consolidated into a single unified documentation system.
  • Documentation available in browser as well as printable/viewable as PDF on demand.
  • Personalized documentation experience, allowing dark/light mode, article subscriptions, social media sharing and other useful features.
  • Almost all publicly available documentation on docs.hornbill.com will be open-source and available to fork on GitHub, allowing customers to derive their own custom documentation around Hornbill products should they wish to.

What is the timeline for this site?

  • We have taken the decision to publish and make available early, there is very little content at this time.
  • As and when we have completed/usable documentation, it will be published here.
  • We have a host of additional features we wish to add over time, so please watch this space.
  • We expect most of our existing documentation should be reviewed/migrated to docs.hornbill.com over the coming months.
  • The documentation project will be ongoing, will continue to expand, evolve and improve day-by-day.

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Ensure your workflows are reliable

As system administrators come and go and your service delivery evolves, the number of workflows configured in your instance inevitably grows over time. This is one area where good housekeeping is important, not just from a storage perspective, but also from an administrative standpoint. Workflows can be managed in Configuration > Service Manager > Customize > Workflows.

Ensure your workflows are reliable

Failed workflows can contribute to greater storage consumption. As part of workflow execution, an event log is generated; in the event of an issue, you can review the log’s actions and responses. An event log is generated for every workflow that is running in the application.

When the workflow reaches a successful conclusion (i.e. a state of Completed) or is canceled (a state of Canceled) its logs are purged 7 days after. Logs are only retained for workflow instances with a state of In progress, Suspended, or Failed. Workflows that are In progress or Suspended are still active, however those that are in a failed state have encountered problems and have stalled. Logs for failed processes are retained for much longer (3 months), so you have time to take action to understand the reason for failure and address this in the workflow design so that further workflow instances can avoid failure. Workflows that have already failed should be dealt with appropriately, either by fixing or canceling the specific workflow instance.

You can inspect the details of any active workflow in the Workflows section (Configuration > [application] > Manage Executed Workflows), of the associated application, for example, Service Manager.

You should monitor the Manage Executed Workflows area periodically to ensure workflows are running reliably through to completion. Any failed workflows should be investigated, and the root caused addressed.

Delete old workflow designs

Deleting old workflows that are no longer used will help manage the storage consumed.

To delete a workflow, click the Delete workflow button (trash can icon) in the workflow’s row in the list.

Workflows can be deleted only if there are no active instances of the design running in the application, for example in the case of Service Manager workflows running against requests.

Design efficiently

Many workflow operations have the option to post a timeline update to a request as part of performing the operation. While an individual timeline update doesn’t contribute a great deal to storage consumption, these will accumulate over time. Consider whether a timeline update as part of the workflow operation is really necessary before enabling it.

To control the timeline content generated by a workflow node, hover over the node, click the cog icon, and in Options, set the System Timeline Update and Manual Timeline Update parameters to Ignore.

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