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Jam-in-a-Box - Single User Environment for CP4BA 25.0.0 (coming soon)

Important

This is not yet available but should hopefully be coming soon. For now please refer to this document for an alternative or use the environment for CP4BA 23.0.2.

Important

  • As this approach relies on reserving an environment from IBM TechZone, this document is only applicable to IBM Business Partners that have the ability to request environments from TechZone and IBMers.
  • In addition, to use this environment, accessing the bastion host via RDP is required. Ensure you have an RDP tool of choice for your operating system.
  • Showcasing RPA in action as part of the Client Onboarding scenario requires a few manual configuration steps as described below.

If you have your own Cloud Pak for Business Automation (CP4BA) 25.0.0 environment and can't use RDP, please refer to this document and this document for other options.

Quick Start

  1. Reserve and prepare the Jam-in-a-Box environment as described in the section below
  2. Read the Lab Considerations section for specifics of using the labs in the context of this Jam-in-a-Box environment
  3. Follow the link to the documentation of the lab you want to perform in the Lab Instructions section

Overview

This Jam-in-a-Box environment is provided to you by the IBM Business Automation and Digital Labor SWAT team.

The major benefits of using this environment are:

  • Provisioning time is only 2-3 hours
  • Client Onboarding scenario and lab artifacts are pre-deployed for you
  • All links and user credentials are stored for you in Firefox

Based on the technology used to achieve a short provisioning time, you need to perform a few simple steps before you can use the environment.

What's included:

  • Red Hat OpenShift (OCP 4.1x) on VMWare on IBM Cloud
  • IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation 25.0.0

Reserve and Prepare the Jam-in-a-Box Single User Environment

  1. Reserve your environment on IBM TechZone from the IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation and Digital Labor - Jam-in-a-Box collection by clicking on the Jam in a Box - Single-User - CP4BA 25.0.0 tile (coming soon)

    On the Create a reservation page make the following selections:

    • Purpose: e.g. Education
    • Purpose description: Enter any text
      Tip: The selection you make here determines if you need to specify a 'Sales Opportunity number' and the 'reservation policy' (how long the environment is available and how often it can be extended).
    • Preferred Geography: Select the geography that is closest to you.
      Remark: Depending on available capacity the deployment have been seen to fail sometimes. Please request another environment, potentially selecting a different geography.
    • End date and time: Should get populated automatically. No changes needed.
    • Accept the terms and conditions: In the lower right corner, check the box
    • Submit

  2. Wait till the environment is Ready, this will normally take between 2-3 hours

  3. Once your environment is Ready, connect to the bastion host through RDP (open the reserved environment from https://techzone.ibm.com/my/reservations and copy the RDP value at the top to your RDP tool) Important: The credentials to login to the bastion host are mention in the description of the tile

  4. From within the bastion host

    1. Open Firefox using the icon on the desktop
    2. Open the Red Hat OpenShift console by clicking the Red Hat OpenShift bookmark
    3. Login to the Red Hat OpenShift console using the credentials for the user ocadmin that are stored in Firefox
    4. Copy the login command to the clipboard (Under "ocadmin" in the top right corner click Copy login command, a new tab opens, log in again using ocadmin, click Display Token, and then copy the entire line under Log in with this token)
    5. Open a Terminal using the respective icon on the desktop, paste the content from the clipboard (right click on the Terminal window, then select "Paste"), and press Enter to login to your Red Hat OpenShift cluster from the command line
    6. Type ./31-prepareJiaB4usage.sh (including the dot) at the beginning) and press Enter to execute the script that prepares the environment for usage
    7. When the script asks you if you want to continue, enter y (or Y or Yes or YES) and press Enter
    8. Once the script completes, your environment is ready to be used for the supported labs. Follow the respective lab instructions for the next steps

Important

It might happen that:

  • the login does not work, or shows "Error 502 - Bad Gateway". In this case please wait for some more time (about 15 minutes), then the log-in should work and the requested page is shown
  • the login results in "404 Page not found" error. In this case please wait for some more time, then the log-in should work and the requested page is shown

These issues are the result of restarting some pods, which may take a different amount of time depending on the resources available on TechZone.

Reserve RPA VM and Update the Jam-in-a-Box Single User Environment

  1. Reserve your RPA environment on IBM TechZone from the IBM Business Automation - Traditional and On-Premises collection by clicking on one of the IBM Business Automation - Traditional and On-premises. V4.x tiles
  2. Fill in the reservation details and wait till the environment is Ready. This will normally take between 2-3 hours
  3. Once your environment is Ready, click on the reservation in TechZone and copy the URL shown for RPA Asynch Server API at the top under Published services
  4. In your Jam-in-a-Box - Single-User environment, open a browser and click on the IBM BA Studio bookmark
  5. From the top-left hamburger menu select Business Automation
  6. On the left click on Workflow and then on the tile Client Onboarding on the right (don't click the open link)
  7. Click on the three dots next to the blue open button and select Open in Process Designer
  8. Select Environment variables as part of the Workflow automation settings
  9. Scroll down to the variables rpaBotExecutionUser and rpaServer
  10. For rpaBotExecutionUser set the value to cp4badmin
  11. For rpaServer set the value to the value you copied previously from RPA Asynch Server API
  12. Click on the round checkmark icon with a small 1 in the top right corner and click on Business automations in the bread crump

After you have manually applied this configuration change the RPA bot will be invoked when you perform the Client Onboarding scenario with use cp4badmin.

Labs Instructions & Considerations

Lab Considerations

The lab instructions are written in context of a Tech Jam event. When performing the labs as part of Jam-in-a-Box keep in mind:

Lab instructions mention... As part of this Jam-in-a-Box environment...
using the URLs found on the Tech Jam event page please use the bookmarks created for you in Firefox
how to receive your user credentials using a link on the Tech Jam event page please use the credentials stored within Firefox for either the admin user cp4badmin or the business user usr001
to prefix your artifacts with "usrXYZ" you may choose to still follow the instructions in this point, even when this is not strictly required as this is a single-user environment

Tip

Initially the environment may appear a little slow. Once the components have warmed up, it should perform reasonably well.

Lab Instructions

Below you find the links to the lab instructions for the labs supported in this environment:

Support

We aim to support successfully utilizing our Jam-in-a-Box.

Business Partners (require an invitation) and IBMers

To engage us, drop us a message at #jam-in-a-box-ba-dl.

All others

For anyone who doesn’t fall into the business partner or IBM employee category, please feel free to open a new issue on our GitHub repository. We’ll be more than happy to address your questions and concerns there.

Disclaimer

The information, tools, and artifacts describes and linked are provided AS-IS and without any warranty. Please also refer to the license that is part of this repository for details.