IA Cloud component overview
The article provides a comprehensive overview of Intelligent Automation Cloud Enterprise (IA Cloud) components, their server deployment, and data flows across them. The figure below illustrates how the components are joined together to form the IA Cloud architecture.
Application level
On the level, IA Cloud comprises such major GUI applications as Control Tower and WorkSpace. In addition to them, the platform features development tools and third-party integrations for user management and data logging.
Control Tower
It is a central management web application intended to orchestrate the automation of processes and tasks. It provides a graphical interface for power users, administrators, and developers to accomplish the following tasks:
- Design, run, schedule, and monitor automations and associated workflows
- Handle the input and output data related to automations
- Create and design Manual Tasks
- Train and manage machine learning models
- Configure system settings
- View and manage WorkFusion Analytics
To learn more about the application, read Get started with Control Tower.
Related components: WorkSpace, Workflow, RPA, AutoML, OCR, File Storage, WorkFusion Studio
Bot Manager
Via Control Tower, you can also access Bot Manager—a web application that uses Bot Agents on RPA servers to manage RPA units and send commands. It allows the following:
- Manage server processes
- Maintain active RDP sessions
- Monitor hardware utilization and statistics for bots and instances
Related components: Control Tower, RPA, Analytics, Database, Secrets Vault
To learn more about the app, read the Work with Bot Manager topic. To understand how it interacts with other RPA components, refer to the Deploy RPA article.
Workspace
It is a web application that offers a human-in-the-loop experience, allowing human workers to interact effectively with bots. Workspace receives input from bots and creates assignments for users. The output is sent to Control Tower and handled further by bots. Related key performance indicators are displayed on the dashboards in Control Tower.
To learn more about the application, read the Get started with Workspace topic.
Related components: Control Tower, Object Storage
User management
IA Cloud features a unified user management interface based on Keycloak where you can do the following:
- Manage all users (admins, Ops specialists, and so on) from a single application
- Provide built-in single sign-on (SSO) across IA Cloud components—Kibana, Workspace, and Control Tower
- Integrate with external Identity Providers
- Limit access to specific IA Cloud functionality based on user roles
To learn more about the component, read the Getting started with WorkFusion User Management topic.
The figure below illustrates how the user management system (Keycloak) interacts with the rest of the IA Cloud components.
Platform Monitor
It is an interface where you can view and manage logs and a set of dashboards monitoring the performance of the platform components. You can access it from Control Tower.
In IA Cloud, logging and monitoring are based on the ELK stack: Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. For details, read Monitoring.
Service level
The service level covers the IA Cloud components that underly WorkFusion GUI applications and enable the execution of the automations and processes launched from these apps and supporting interactions across the platform levels.
AutoML
The AutoML component finds the best Machine Learning model for a particular target function expressed in a Manual Task, trains and validates it, and finally predicts the target variables.
To learn more about the component, refer to the What can AutoML do topic.
Related components: WorkFusion Studio, Control Tower, Object Storage
RPA
The RPA (Robotic Process Automation) Cluster is a scalable computing environment responsible for automating user scenarios within desktop or web applications.
To learn more about the RPA technology, refer to the View automation technology classification topic.
Related components: WorkFusion Studio, Control Tower
OCR
The OCR (Optical Character Recognition) engine processes scanned documents, converting unstructured, image-based data into structured-character documents in several formats, such as HTML, XML. It supports the following OCR providers: ABBYY, Azure AI Document Intelligence, and Google Vision.
Related components: WorkFusion Studio, Control Tower, WorkSpace, Object Storage
Workflow
Workflow Engine executes automation processes authored in Control Tower according to the process definitions. This is a server application configured within Control Tower. Execution is handled in different computing environments—RPA, WorkSpace, OCR, and AutoML.
Related components: Control Tower, RPA, Workspace, AutoML
Analytics
WorkFusion Analytics offers a comprehensive collection of dashboards that aggregate and display metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs).
To learn more about the component, refer to the Analytics components and licensing topic.
Related components: Control Tower, Workspace
BEP
Bot Execution Platform (BEP) is a platform that creates tasks, submits them to queues, routes to isolated BEP Workers, and receives the task performance results.
To learn more about the component, refer to the Explore BEP components topic.
Related components: Control Tower, AutoML, Workflow, RPA
Data level
The data level comprises components used for storing and managing data used across the IA Cloud platform, including sensitive information, such as passwords, access tokens, and so on.
Database
WorkFusion uses MS SQL as its database server. MS SQL Server stores Business Process definitions, as well as runtime and tracking information on their executions, including RPA and AutoML, and supplies these data as requested by other software applications.
Related components: Control Tower, Workspace, Analytics
Secrets Vault
It is secure storage for sensitive data.
To learn more about the component, refer to the Set up Secrets Vault topic.
Related components: Control Tower, RPA
Object Storage
It is reliable storage for OCR results and trained AutoML models. It keeps binary file type content, such as OCR results, AutoML models, screenshots, and reports generated by automations.
Related components: WorkFusion Studio, Workflow, OCR, AutoML
BP data management model
Datamarts implement a unified approach to handle data generated by Business Processes (BP). The approach enables building custom Analytics for any AI Agents, employing a pre-defined set of extensible components.
Datamarts include:
A standard schema for Data Stores
Out-of-the-box extract, transmit, load (ETL) operations for loading data into a centralized data warehouse
A set of pre-defined data views for dashboards
For details, refer to the Extendable Data Model article.
Data flow across IA Cloud components
The figure below illustrates in a simplified way how users interact with IA Cloud components and how data move across them.
The digits in the diagram above correspond to the following descriptions:
A business user launches or schedules a Business Process via Control Tower (CT).
CT sends Bot Tasks to BEP for execution.
BEP sends tasks that require the usage of the RPA functionality, such as accessing underlying applications (SAP, Outlook, so on), to RPA bots for execution.
The OCR server digitizes documents retrieved by RPA bots—that means, converts them into the XML format for further processing. AutoML downloads the model required for the task and consumes the digitized documents to predict the output.
If any attribute in a document requires validation by a worker or a Subject Matter Expert (SME), the document is sent to Workspace.
In Workspace, SMEs validate or extract data from the documents. Workspace submits the validated or processed documents back to CT.
CT, BEP, AutoML, OCR, RPA, and Workspace components use the data layer—Secrets Vault, MS SQL Server, File Storage—for data and secret storage and retrieval.
Development tools
To facilitate the design of automations, WorkFusion offers a special development environment—IA Cloud Developer. The figure below illustrates the components involved in operating the environment.
Server deployment
To learn how IA Cloud components are distributed across servers and how the servers interact with each other, see the deployment diagram.
In case any of the platform components becomes non-operational, look for troubleshooting tips in the following support guides: