Running and Monitoring a Workflow

Overview

When you submit a workflow run, Workbench sends it to the workflow engine you specified. The workflow engine interprets the workflow and generates commands for individual tasks. The engine then dispatches these commands to the cloud or on-premises backend through a service that orchestrates computational resources, executes the work, and writes outputs to storage.

While workflows are running, Workbench monitors the status of the run and of individual tasks, allowing you to view corresponding logs as they complete. Additionally, the Monitor page provides options to resubmit workflows (with the same or updated configurations), abort workflow runs that are in progress, and delete past workflow runs from the table.

Step-by-step instructions

This procedure assumes you have already selected a workflow to run and configured its inputs, and that you are currently looking at the completed workflow inputs configuration page.

• Step 1: Click the “Submit Run” button at the top right of the workflow inputs configuration page. This will open the “Run Preview” dialog, which summarizes some key information (name, version, and how many parallel runs will be launched).

• Step 2: In the “Run Preview” dialog, select a connected Workflow Engine. If none is listed, follow the instructions in Connecting to a Workflow Engine.

• Step 3: (optional) Enter some tags in the “Tags” field to annotate the run. Tags can be used to identify and filter runs. Tags should be provided in the format key: value. Multiple tags may be provided by separating key: value pairs with commas, or by pressing return following entering a tag.

• Step 4: Click the “Submit” button at the bottom right of the “Run Preview” dialog. This will submit the workflow to the workflow engine and bring up a monitoring page displaying the logs produced by the new run. The list of tasks, their status, and the overall run status will periodically be updated on the screen, as the run progresses, until completion.

You can view additional information about the workflow run by clicking the Overview, Inputs, and Outputs tabs on that same page.

If you navigate away from the monitoring page before the run is complete, you can return to it by clicking “Monitor” in the main left-hand menu. This will bring you to the top-level Monitor page, which lists workflows that are currently running as well as previous runs. You can filter the list to display only a specific subset using the search box to filter runs by workflow name. Additionally, menus on the right can be used to filter runs by date of creation, completion status, and tags. To return to the run detail page for a particular run, click the corresponding row in the list of runs.

Additional run monitoring and management options

Resubmit

You can resubmit a workflow run directly from the Monitor page, either by choosing “Rerun” in the “Actions” menu (in the table of runs) or clicking the “Rerun” button on the run monitoring details page (top right corner). In either case, you have the opportunity to keep the same configuration or make changes to the configuration before submitting the workflow. When you are ready, click “Submit Run”; after that, you will go through the normal run submission procedure described above.

Abort

You can abort runs that are currently running. To abort a single run, click “Abort Run” in the “Actions” menu for that run (in the table of runs). To abort multiple runs, select them by ticking the corresponding boxes in the table of runs, then click on the button with three dots at the top right of the table of runs, and click “Abort Runs”.

Delete

You can delete runs from the table of runs. Note that this simply removes the entry from the table and does not touch any files that were produced by the run. To delete a single run, click “Delete Run” in the “Actions” menu for that run ( in the table of runs). You can also delete a run by clicking on the trash can icon on its monitoring details page. To delete multiple runs, select them by ticking the corresponding boxes in the table of runs, then click on the button with three dots at the top right of the table of runs, and click “Delete Runs”.